Store secrets with quorum approval
Glassbreak Team · Published 2026-07-19
A team secret in Glassbreak — a root password, an API key, a certificate — is encrypted so that no single person, and no server, can read it alone. The encryption key is mathematically split into N shares, one per chosen team member, such that any K of them can reconstruct it and any fewer learn nothing at all. That "K of N" is the quorum. All of the cryptography happens in your browser; Glassbreak's servers only store and relay ciphertext.
Personal vs team secrets
- Personal (1-of-1): you are the only holder. You can decrypt it yourself, any time, with no approvals.
- Team (K-of-N, with K at least 2): reading it requires agreement. A 2-of-3 secret means any two of the three holders acting together can recover it — and one person acting alone cannot.
Choose K for safety (how many people must agree) and N for resilience (how many can be unavailable before the secret is stranded). 2-of-3 suits a small team's shared credential; 3-of-5 suits anything truly damaging in the wrong hands.
Create a secret
- Go to your team's secrets and choose New secret. Pick a type (password, API key, certificate, note, document) and enter the value.
- In the Access control step, select the holders. Only teammates who have completed their encryption key setup can be selected.
- Set the threshold K with the slider; N is simply the number of holders you selected.
- Save. Your browser encrypts the value, splits the key, and encrypts one share to each holder's personal keys. The unsplit key is then discarded — no copy exists anywhere.
The Free plan includes 10 secrets; paid plans are unlimited.
Request and approve decryption
- A holder who needs the value opens a decryption request, with a reason. (You must be a holder — team membership alone isn't enough.)
- The other holders see it under Pending approvals. Each approver's browser decrypts their own share locally and re-encrypts it for the requester — the server never sees a share in the clear. Approvers can instead reject with a reason.
- Because the requester contributes their own share, the request completes after K − 1 approvals. The requester's browser then combines the shares, verifies the secret's authorship signature, and decrypts.
- Requests expire if the quorum isn't gathered in time, and every request, approval, rejection, and access is written to the team's audit log.
Deleting a secret — same quorum
Destroying a shared secret is as consequential as reading it, so deletion mirrors the decryption flow: a holder opens a deletion request, and it executes only after K − 1 other holders approve (requests lapse after 24 hours). A personal 1-of-1 secret can be deleted directly. When a holder leaves the team, the remaining holders can re-key the secret under a fresh key so the departed member's old share becomes useless.