Glossary
Split Knowledge
Split knowledge divides a secret — a master key, a root credential — into parts distributed across multiple people, such that no single person's part is sufficient on its own to reconstruct the whole. Compromising or coercing one holder yields only a fragment, not the secret itself, which is precisely the property that makes this useful for the small number of secrets whose exposure would be most severe.
The practice trades a real security benefit for real operational cost: reconstructing the secret requires coordinating multiple people, which is deliberately slower and more cumbersome than a single person acting alone — a cost worth paying specifically for the handful of secrets where that friction is the point, not for routine operational credentials.