A secure and fault-tolerant, or variation-tolerant, method and system to turn a set of N shares into an identifier even when only M shares from this set have a correct value. A secret sharing algorithm is used to generate a number of candidate identifiers from subsets of shares associated with asset parameters of a collection of assets. The most frequently occurring candidate identifier is then determined to be the final identifier. The method has particular applicability in the fields of node locking and fingerprinting.