The extra hidden part of the plan is that I try to avoid things that aren't tracable to a trusted human help desk. Anything that involves the words "manage your own private key" is a point of failure that needs a lot of care.
How do you handle your password manager (assuming you use one)?
Assuming what she needs is access to my email (yes) and gigabyte of photos from my drunk college days (no).
Tedious, yes. But fairly reliable and you don't have to place any trust in your attorneys at all, unless they find out who their counterpart is and start working together (very unlikely). If this system wouldn't work for you, you've probably got bigger problems than having to worry about your wife getting into your email after you die.
Personally, my wife would wonder why I'm going to so much trouble to keep my passwords secret from her until I die; but then my personal password store is for services we share like banking, and any passwords she doesn't know are benign things like my email addresses and various website logins that wouldn't matter anyway when I die. Of course I also have my work passwords (I'm the IT manager), but my supervisor and the company owner each have a secured store of all of my work passwords as well, plus the master password to access them, in the event something happens to me (or I'm just on vacation for a week and temporarily unreachable when access is needed).
Much less tedious, and concentrates trust in the one person who should have it - the spouse!
A bit of research might be indicated, before trusting this strategy to perform when needed.
Also, are you going to SSH in every time you need to access a document from your phone? Again, use-cases differ, but that's not a 1-to-1 alternative to, say, Dropbox.
Your original comment amounted to "you don't need to apply updates if you firewall everything", to which I replied "that's not a replacement for a cloud service". Your subsequent comments then amount to "well you can just poke a hole in your firewall for WireGuard". So which is it, do you need to apply updates (e.g. to WireGuard) or not?
here's a quick blog post I wrote with my plan. The app is trivial to write if you find a library for your preferred language
In that scenario though, I'd also be out of my digital life even if I had access to 1password.
[1]: https://github.com/cyphar/paperback [2]: https://youtu.be/GI9rKdM9rB8
* Further split up the trust such that the key shards can be held by one group but they don't have access to the document (maybe you keep a copy of the document with a lawyer but distribute the keys among your friends and family so that if your lawyer is hacked or bribed they can't reveal the secrets, same goes for if your friends conspire against you).
* Make the shards small, independent of the document size, so that they're always practical for friends to store even if you have a very large document to save.
* You can do a quorum expansion (create new shards that are compatible with the existing shards) without revealing the secret.
Three reasons:
- Banks fubar safe deposit boxes all of the time, in a variety of ways.
- Once the bank figures out that you’re dead, it’s sealed without a court order.
- As you get older it’s more likely that you’ll screw up payments, lose keys or codes, etc.
Also, the attorney will advise your loved ones on what they can do. For example, you need a power of attorney for many things.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/19/business/safe-deposit-box...
Despite the issues, there are still valid uses for a safe deposit box. I live in a highly fire-prone area and keep a backup drive with family photos and documents in a safe deposit box in a local place that won't burn when I do.
https://abc7news.com/archive/8973198/
Note the police are not classifying this as a criminal case (theft), but a civil case.
Which is why you need to put a tamper-proof box INSIDE a security box in a bank. Key to that box will be in your house, far away from bank personnel.
I even wrote a trivial console app to let my wife restore my secrets if I were to drop dead tonight.
If I were to be imprisoned, for example, I might want my lawyer and family to be able to access all of my emails from two years ago up to one week ago. If I were to suddenly die, I would want my family to have full access to all of my accounts, with little hassle.
I would like to be able to tell my email provider (through my account settings) that if at least two people out of each of these three groups agree that such-and-such condition has been met, then these people will be granted this sort of access. The process would notify the other members of the groups I defined and have a delay to allow some kind of veto/vote if there is any disagreement. It may be a bit fiddly, but if a standard were defined for how the interaction works from a user's perspective (including steps to make sure you understand the consequences of how you've configured it), at least it could work consistently across all kinds of accounts.
based on their dynamics, I'm feeling pretty good. I know I have some people there that are tech savvy + some that will take good care of their shares and when they should send those to whom.
Implementation is trivial (especially if you find a library) but maybe you can be inspired by my plan https://g3rv4.com/2022/04/a-plan-for-my-secrets
I don't think SecretSharingDotNet has had any audits, and I'm pretty sure i hasn't been checked for side-channel attacks. I couldn't find anything in GitHub [1] saying it's no longer maintained though.
I'm pretty sure a well founded attacker would be able to hack me, but I think it's orders of magnitude more likely that I'll forget my master password, I'll get stolen, my apartment will catch on fire or I'll just die. Those are the scenarios I'm preparing for.
There is probably a lot to be said to curate your accounts to assist those sifting through your estate.
The ability to pass your information legacy is important, and complicated. The trope of your mother going through their mother’s papers and finding a long lost love letter - or an unfinished manuscript - is equally plausible today. What secrets lurk in your DMs, Messenger and Signal history? Does your draft blog post actually contain some amazingly insightful observation?
Maybe your family’s memory of you could be enriched with this information? …maybe not?
At the end of (your) day(s), you might take those secrets to your grave, and it’s unlikely that your tombstone will include your GUID, or the Glacier storage URI where your online self will remain until the TOS states otherwise.
REST In Blob
EDIT: RAM-mento Moar-i(sorry, got carried away.. couldn’t help myself :)
Things that need to stay secret. That's why they are secrets. If my passing means that these things are no longer accessible to anyone ever again? Perfect. Works as intended.
Short of brain damage, I don't think that would ever happen.
It would be a hassle for my family if I died, though. I'm young, but I should still get that scenario worked out.
I once forgot my phone's unlock pattern. The very same that i had used for years, daily. I'm not someone that normally has memory problems, but i guess a few synapses just refused to do their job for some reason. I actually had an ex tell it to me, otherwise the phone would be bricked (i tried recalling it for basically 2-3 days). Now i have it and the master password for my password database written down and given to a person that i trust.
Kind of a silly and a worrying situation, so it helps to have contingencies for even cases like that. One might worry about Alzheimer's and whatnot after a situation like that, but even healthy "HDDs" occasionally get "bad sectors". Of course, there have also been cases where i forget something that was almost a subconscious memory (e.g. muscle memory) just to remember it a while later.
For context: am in the 20-30 age bracket, no other memory problems or a history of memory problems in my family tree.
Funny you say that. A year ago I went outside to break up a domestic violence situation. I woke up later face down with a brick next to my head. Due to the concussion I forgot my phone's password and that of my ATM card. It took me six months to remember them, although by then I had replaced both.
Shit happens.
If I were chucked into a prison and let out after several years with no computer use in between, I would likely forget all my passwords in the meantime. No brain damage needed, just disuse.
It helps pf course, to have account info, but just knowing the place of business is typically enough.
For clarity, living people lose account numbers and access all the time. The death cert. gives you this same power.
Your master password is the key that decrypts your password vault.
Some sort of escrow would be good, that unlocks a document with access instructions upon receipt of a valid death certificate.
I'm sure there are use cases, but it's actually very hard for me to think of them, let alone in just a minute or so.