[HN Gopher] Show HN: If you lose your memory, how to regain acce...
___________________________________________________________________
Show HN: If you lose your memory, how to regain access to your
computer?
Due to bike-induced concussions, I've been worried for a while
about losing my memory and not being able to log back in. I
combined shamir secret sharing (hashicorp vault's implementation)
with age-encryption, and packaged it using WASM for a neat in-
browser offline UX. The idea is that if something happens to me,
my friends and family would help me get back access to the data
that matters most to me. 5 out of 7 friends need to agree for the
vault to unlock. Try out the demo in the website, it runs entirely
in your browser!
Author : eljojo
Score : 360 points
Date : 2026-02-06 18:51 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (eljojo.github.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (eljojo.github.io)
| moltymolt wrote:
| That's an interesting idea. It's a good solution to the problem
| of sharing all your passwords with your loved ones posthumously.
| Typically that'd involve keeping everything in a vault which will
| automatically be released to your person of choice if you failed
| to reset it. The annoying part is having to reset it
| indefinitely. I like your idea where you share it with multiple
| people in advance but they would have to collectively decide to
| unlock it.
| eljojo wrote:
| exactly! my hope is to offload some trust to the collective of
| my friends
| ddtaylor wrote:
| I suffered a traumatic brain injury (TBI) related to an e-bike
| accident two years ago. I woke up in the ICU after a short coma-
| like thing and the nurses/doctors asking me questions and it was
| clear I was answering for the 10th time or more, like we had all
| done this before, but I couldn't remember anything.
|
| Thankfully my very long password I use for an encrypted
| Borgbackup I have was somewhere deep or untouched, but, otherwise
| I would have been fucked. Also, the backup codes Google told me
| they would always accept failed and it wasn't until I found a
| random unused Android device in a drawer that had been unused for
| a year was I able to get access back to my Google account of ~25
| years.
| ericbarrett wrote:
| I also had old Google backup codes fail a few years ago.
| Anybody who hasn't regenerated them in a year or two, I
| recommend you do so.
| lucenet wrote:
| Well, this is disturbing news.
| Zambyte wrote:
| Google services are best treated as a liability.
| tencentshill wrote:
| Make Google Takeouts a part of your backup routine.
| bornfreddy wrote:
| I have (had?) a Google account tied to my email (which is
| on a domain I own). Not sure if I ever gave them my phone
| number, initially. Tried to login a few years back, correct
| password, but they insisted on me entering my phone.
| Finally I did - and they can't let me in because my
| "provider is not supported" and they can't send an SMS with
| the code, so I'm locked out. Tried every few months since
| then, no go. Fortunately I didn't lose much (except some
| family photos), but it is annoying as hell. I wouldn't
| trust Google with anything important. And yes, I tried with
| an brand new number on a new phone, unrelated provider. No
| dice. According to reddit I'm far from alone in this. So if
| you rely on a Google account for anything... Well, good
| luck!
| rektlessness wrote:
| Long-term access recovery typically requires rituals like
| annual check-ins, media rotation, and human drills. We
| already do this with annual fire-drills.
| lucb1e wrote:
| My password manager has, *checks*, precisely 900 entries.
| Say that I care about maybe ten percent, that's still doing
| a "drill" on every single weekend day of the year
|
| Security aspects of software should just work properly.
| Google should test this and, imo, people should make
| backups of data they care about. Google might ban you for
| any reason, no matter if the recovery drill worked 2 hours
| ago it might not work anymore now. Seems like a fool's
| errand to keep chasing it instead of making routine (or
| automated) backups of data when you update it
| eljojo wrote:
| my stomach turned into a knot just reading your story. I know
| that feel of waking up surrounded by nurses not knowing what
| happened. I'm so glad you had proper backups!!!!!!!!!!
|
| this exact story is why i built my app, thank you so much for
| sharing.
|
| my hope is to basically make a next version of your plan that's
| distributed among friends.
| lucb1e wrote:
| Wow, it both surprises me but also makes me feel justified in
| that I keep telling people to make backups of things they care
| about _including_ something like a Spotify account (if your
| song lists are dear to them, at least the titles and other
| metadata that they could rebuild from) and other "cloud" or
| SaaS services. Anything one cares about, back it up! (Not to
| you but as a PSA)
|
| Still, it's weird that Google doesn't accept a recovery code.
| Then again, I had a similar issue where I had nothing set up
| but a recovery email address and password (back when 2FA was
| rare), and after confirming both, Google said "well, we still
| think it's suspicious, why don't you use a device where you're
| already logged in" (my account had no active sessions that I
| knew of, besides that I was traveling). Luckily I didn't need
| it for anything as I had my email moved away already at that
| time. I still can't access that account today and I switched to
| throwaway accounts for things like youtube comments or app
| downloads from the play store (need to download that government
| authentication software somehow...)
|
| Did Google specifically reject the recovery code as invalid, or
| did it accept all entries and then their algorithm rejected the
| login outright?
| ddtaylor wrote:
| It accepted the backup code and my correct password and then
| wanted to verify more stuff, which there was nothing, and
| just said "Sorry, we can't give you access to your account
| right now".
| lucb1e wrote:
| Ah, yes okay that sounds precisely like my situation as
| well. Not so much the backup codes not working as Google's
| auth gatekeeper being moody, the last thing you want from a
| login system
| ddtaylor wrote:
| I understand how it plays out, but these are backup codes
| that I put into a backup strategy for serious life events
| and both times I needed them they failed to accomplish
| what they are for =(
|
| Had I followed Googles own advice and relied entirely on
| these codes (which I thought I was doing) I would still
| be locked out of all those accounts, purchase history,
| Google Play Developer, etc.
| modeless wrote:
| For this purpose Google offers "Inactive Account Manager" AKA a
| dead man's switch.
| couchdive wrote:
| 3 months of non-use is the lowest term available before it will
| enact. That's too long for most situations except maybe probate
| court
| eljojo wrote:
| I don't use Google :(
| bsza wrote:
| Set up a Github action to send out the secret if you don't
| commit to a repo every x days? You could even combine it with
| secret sharing to make sure your friends can't access it
| unless you're really in trouble.
| sowbug wrote:
| You don't need to use Google day-to-day. Create a single-
| purpose Gmail account and set up Inactive Account Manager to
| provide Google Drive access to your trusted contacts at the
| designated time. Put a single document in the drive that
| contains whatever your recovery instructions are, and encrypt
| it with the secret that is unlocked with your M-of-N Shamir
| shares.
|
| Now you don't have to trust your M of N friends as much,
| because they can conspire to unlock the secret early, but
| they won't get access to the document that the secret unlocks
| until after your demise.
|
| There are non-fatal problems with this approach -- your N
| friends have to recognize the email they receive from a
| strange Gmail address 3 months after you're gone. You might
| lose the password to the Gmail account and be unable to get
| in there yourself, causing it to declare you dead when you're
| not. All these issues can be mitigated with extra care.
| bitexploder wrote:
| Low tech: I put my secret manager password in a physical journal
| that is locked in a fire proof, water proof vault and hidden
| somewhere only my partner and myself know where it is. I use a
| password manager. Everything else goes in the password manager.
| rcxdude wrote:
| In general whatever kind of backup plan you have for when you
| die could also work in this scenario, you may just need to
| think harder about anything that you do not want have revealed
| when you die.
| munk-a wrote:
| Alternative - my partner and I (and also two other close
| contacts) have password managers that contain each of the other
| one's secret. This was less an effort to help with the memory
| loss scenario and more of an effort to deal with death and
| access to services (especially to cease subscriptions and the
| like).
|
| In a lower trust scenario you could probably use a lawyer as a
| broker of the secret (potentially even as part of a will).
| rcxdude wrote:
| Password managers like bitwarden also have emergency access
| features which can do this, with the caveat of trusting them
| to enforce the requirement of access only being granted after
| a notification to the account holder is not denied in some
| time period (but unlike the lawyer you're not trusting them
| with the secret directly)
| spockz wrote:
| Apple has this thing called Legacy Contact which allows the
| same but then built in to the whole Apple account. This
| includes devices as well as the iCloud ~~and attached
| keychains. Granted, it is another hoop to jump through
| compared to presharing keys with each other.~~
|
| It would be nice if your Apple account could be unlocked
| with some other keys as well apart from the primary one,
| but I guess that is what Apple calls the "Legacy Contact
| Key".
|
| Edit: okay so the keychain is excluded from this. So back
| to storing each others passwords in eachothers keychain...
| eljojo wrote:
| I didn't know about bit warden doing this until today! I
| definitely have to look closer into it, been using
| 1password for more than a decade and I keep being
| disappointed. I'd definitely like off-sourcing this to
| someone instead of building it myself
| eljojo wrote:
| this is honestly a very pragmatic solution. the amount of
| life-long relationships i've seen vanish overnight has got me
| to reconsider my choices when it comes to single points of
| failure.
|
| I like the idea of the lawyer, unlike normal people, they
| like sticking to their promises.
| kwanbix wrote:
| So if you and your partner die, whoever is part of your
| family is fck.
| wafflemaker wrote:
| Bitwarden allows a quite large number of emergency
| contacts.
|
| There are two rules: 1. You need to be a paying customer
| when setting up. 2. The other person needs to have a
| Bitwarden account.
| maurycyz wrote:
| This. A physical safe provides something that you can't do
| digitally: It's hard, but not impossible to get in without
| credentials.
|
| On the internet, it's either: Public for anyone in the whole
| world, or impossible to recover if anything goes wrong.
| kylehotchkiss wrote:
| I've broken into Physical Safes using nothing more than a
| drill with a half inch bit (I was young and didn't want to
| drag myself to harbor freight to sacrifice a more suitable
| tool). Enough boreholes and I had access.
|
| In hindsight, looking harder for the key would probably have
| been fruitful.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| Nothing says you cannot trivially encode the paper
| password. Those in the know understand that you need to
| append "BoomShakalaka", replace "A" with "Q", or some other
| super simple modification to what is recorded.
|
| Maybe the NSA would be willing to brute force the infinite
| variations from that starting seed, but it is still
| effectively locked for mortals.
| mathstuf wrote:
| I've thought about making a "word search" and embedding
| the passphrase in it using a pattern (e.g., a subset of a
| Knight's tour, a space-filling curve overlay, or some
| other sampling algorithm).
| unsnap_biceps wrote:
| https://www.passwordcard.org/en
|
| I used to keep a password card in my wallet and had a
| pattern I would use.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| If you add an explicit reminder to check the email where
| you explained the modification, then the idea seems
| solid. Tough at that point put half the password on paper
| and send the other half to a whole bunch of trusted
| people.
| repiret wrote:
| This is what I do too, but be warned about "fire proof" - a
| fire that results in the total loss of your house will create
| enough heat for enough time that fireproof gun safes and
| smaller fireproof lockboxes will be destroyed, or even if not,
| their contents will get hot enough to combust anyway.
|
| A bank safe deposit box offers a different security profile
| that's probably more robust against fire because banks burn
| less often than houses.
|
| It's probably not practical to really be robust against fire
| without being buried several feet deep.
| eljojo wrote:
| do you store stuff in a bank? could you tell me more about
| it? my account gives me access to one for free and been
| meaning to put a yubikey there for a while but never have
| cyberax wrote:
| I do. I have a small safe deposit box in my local branch
| for about $1 a year.
|
| It's great if you want to store some documents. But don't
| expect _real_ security. It's guarded by a minimum-wage
| employee, and the keys are usually laughably insecure.
| Banks know this, so they cap their liability for the loss
| of the deposit box at around $1000.
|
| So don't even think about storing gold bars there, like
| they do in movies.
|
| There _are_ companies that provide safe storage for high-
| value items, but they are pretty exotic.
| eljojo wrote:
| that's... a really good perspective to have, thanks for
| sharing!
| nightshift1 wrote:
| Safe deposit boxes are not safe. There are many stories of
| peoples stuff going missing.
|
| ex: https://www.cbc.ca/news/safety-deposit-box-
| protection-1.7338...
|
| https://archive.is/www.nytimes.com/2019/07/19/business/safe
| -...
| jerezzprime wrote:
| Maybe not safe for valuables. What about stuff that has
| no value to anyone else? I'm not a villain from Ocean's
| Eleven, no one is stealing my passwords to break into my
| elaborate safe.
| saulpw wrote:
| What I found out when I was burgled, was that they don't
| care. I had nothing valuable in my firesafe but they
| still took it wholesale. I found some papers from it
| drifting around outside afterwards like they had dumped
| it out. But not my passport or SSN card. The lock was
| even broken so they could have just opened it to see that
| and saved themselves the lift. But again, they don't
| care.
| MiddleEndian wrote:
| What if you RAID01 it, so you have four safety deposit
| boxes, two with the first half of your password, two with
| the second half of your password? Then no snoop at a
| particular bank would be able to get your password, but
| also if one or two go missing, the password won't be
| lost. And you just check all four boxes once or twice a
| year to make sure everything is good.
| direwolf20 wrote:
| Better do Shamir's Secret Sharing instead, set threshold
| to 2/4, and regenerate all parts if any part goes
| missing.
| whartung wrote:
| My (large) bank is yanking their safety deposit boxes
| out. They let subscribers know that they have, like, 1 or
| 2 years to go. They're doing it across the branches. They
| basically feel it's not worth the liability any more, and
| the way it was presented to me, it's not just them, but
| other banks are also doing (or at least considering)
| this.
|
| Things we take for granted. When my father passed, I was
| digging stuff out of SDBs that he had for decades.
| ses1984 wrote:
| Another solution is to engrave your secret on something
| that's stable up to household fire temperatures.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| A real innovation from the Bitcoin world! There are several
| physical password store systems that they have suggested
| for this kind of use case. The simplest is basically using
| a nail to punch out a password onto a piece of sheet metal.
| echoangle wrote:
| Just make sure that the metal you use has a high enough
| melting point.
| Wistar wrote:
| Tungsten, perhaps.
| direwolf20 wrote:
| Do people usually find big pools of metal on the ground
| in burned houses, or is everyday metal fine?
|
| Especially inside a fireproof safe.
|
| Wouldn't trust aluminium, solder, Wood's metal, gallium,
| or mercury, but apart from that...
| wtetzner wrote:
| Maybe a clay tablet (assuming it's safe from water)?
| rustyhancock wrote:
| Additionally hardware wallets which can use a seed to
| generate huge variety of keys.
|
| Including AGE keys (so you can encrypt arbitrary data),
| SSH keys, FIDO2 and passkeys.
|
| Additionally you might want to store a hardware wallet in
| a deposit box instead of the seed (if you trust the
| security model).
| Terr_ wrote:
| And so we return to our programming-roots with
| punchcards. :p
| amenghra wrote:
| Articles such as https://blog.lopp.net/metal-bitcoin-
| seed-storage-stress-test... will help you pick among the
| various seed stores out there.
| Eduard wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Gelsenkirchen_heist
|
| In December 2025, items worth an estimated EUR30 million were
| stolen from a Sparkasse bank in the Gelsenkirchen suburb of
| Buer, Germany. The thieves used a large drill to break into
| the bank's underground vault and proceeded to crack over
| 3,000 safe deposit boxes.
| nerdsniper wrote:
| Don't need events that extreme. Regular branch banks have
| stuff go missing from the safety deposit boxes shockingly
| regularly. The locks aren't particularly secure and various
| people are able to access them. It can be hard to find
| articles about them because they don't make the news like
| the more remarkable incidents do. Examples of boring
| security box failures (but that were noteworthy in other
| ways so they did make the news): Jennifer Morsch, Roberta
| Glassman, Lianna Sarabekyan (multiple customers affected),
| Philip Poniz, Wells Fargo in Cape Coral FL, Wells Fargo
| Katy TX (many customers affected, blamed on road
| construction down the street), lots of individual stories
| where banks just totally stopped following their own
| procedures on ID checking and logging.
|
| The vast majority of these don't make the news because
| there's no proof there was even anything inside the box in
| the first place so anyone could be lying.
|
| > Mr. Pluard, who tracks legal filings and news reports,
| estimates that around 33,000 boxes a year are harmed by
| accidents, natural disasters and thefts.
|
| > Oddly, the bank returned to him five watches that weren't
| his. "They were the wrong color, the wrong size -- totally
| different than what I had," Mr. Poniz said. "I had no idea
| where they came from."
|
| https://archive.is/j8e6x
| Stratoscope wrote:
| > Regular branch banks have stuff go missing from the
| safety deposit boxes shockingly regularly. The locks
| aren't particularly secure and various people are able to
| access them.
|
| My late wife had a safe deposit box in the Almaden Valley
| (San Jose) branch of US Bank. Her key to the box was
| nowhere to be found. So I had to get the box drilled
| open.
|
| This would normally require a hefty fee. But the branch
| was moving to a new location, so they invited customers
| to make an appointment to show up a Saturday with proper
| ID for a lock drilling party.
|
| I showed my ID and the death certificate, and we went
| into the safe to have the lock drilled.
|
| But there was no real drilling involved. The locksmith
| had a little handheld gadget that she pushed into the
| lock, gave it a little twist, and the door came right
| open.
|
| The ironic part? All that was in there were a few pieces
| of costume jewelry, worth maybe $50 in total.
|
| She was paying more than that per year for the box
| rental, and if I'd had to pay for the "drilling" it would
| probably be more than that.
| rationalist wrote:
| I was with my mother when she went to close her safe
| deposit box. Her key did not work, so after checking her
| ID (could be fake), they used a tool that very quickly
| removed the lock. We were then left alone in the camera-
| less room with all of the other boxes and the tool...
| willmadden wrote:
| Floor safes do better than above-ground safes.
| paulgerhardt wrote:
| Just went through this. Sample size one:
|
| While the fire resulted in the total loss of the house it was
| actually the water from the fire department not the heat that
| did proportionally more damage.
|
| As a mental model you shouldn't think of it as "what if my
| house burns down?" so much as "what if nice strangers roll up
| to my windows and chainsaw through my roof and spray 50,000
| gallons of water in here?"
|
| Yes everything in the mechanical room melted but everything
| in the rest of the house got hot, smoky, soaked and then
| moldy.
|
| For root of trust materiel like social security cards, cash,
| passports put in a ziplock bag in a fireproof, waterproof
| safe. But for other storage I use clear "Ezy Storage" brand
| stackable 50L tubs labeled with Homebox QR codes. In the US,
| Target and Home Depot frequently stock them. I am very anti
| black and yellow tubs.
|
| The majority of work post-fire goes to itemizing your house
| inventory for insurance. Even cataloging all your bathroom's
| soaps by brand name rather than generic can make $100
| difference. Multiply that by 500x different things.
|
| From a threat model perspective I look at rooms from a "what
| would be salvageable in here if I emptied a swimming pool's
| worth of water from some fire sprinklers". Furniture and TVs
| are easy to replace. Other stuff less so.
| alsetmusic wrote:
| This is very interesting and will inform changes in how I
| secure some items. Thanks for the new perspective.
| Loughla wrote:
| We did that with major hail damage a few years ago. I
| learned that in a disaster, you should count on everything
| being junk, and you're lucky if you can salvage anything.
| We also learned the value of itemized lists.
|
| 1500/piece for 20 junk windows I was building a greenhouse
| with that I dug out of the trash the year before. $250 for
| a bird feeder because they couldn't find one outside of
| specialty stores. $40k instead of 10k for a new roof on the
| shed because it was heavier gauge metal than standard.
|
| Exact replacements can be expensive, but you need to make
| sure your insurance has 100% replacement instead of
| adjusted for age or like-kind replacements.
|
| After that experience, we itemized EVERYTHING in the house
| with make, model, serial number, and color. It was a bitch
| to get set up, but took the value of our home contents from
| around 75k to over 250k for exact replacements.
|
| Copies of these records along with our master password for
| our keepass database are in two bank deposit boxes about 45
| minutes apart. For $50/year we can sleep easy.
| eastbound wrote:
| How do you open the bank vault? Key? Passcode?
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| In general, identity (the bank checking who you are) is
| often involved in regular unlocking and there will be an
| identity-only recovery procedure that will work even if
| you lose your usual credential (key, passcode, card,
| whatever). This may involve drilling a lock and the bill
| for that.
| ThePowerOfFuet wrote:
| If you can prove your identity to the bank and have lost
| your key, they will drill the lock to get you into your
| box. For a fee, of course.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| Bank vault can be key+combination (eg three letters) or
| dual key or others. For example in a dual key: one key
| from the bank and one key being your own key.
|
| If a key is lost, you go and prove your identity (easier
| if any bank employee is familiar with you) and ask for a
| new key. A date is set and a locksmith shall come, you
| are next to him and next to the bank employee while he
| uses the bank's key and lockpicks your lock. Then he
| configures it for a new key (or replace the lock).
|
| It's cost you something like $300 or whatever.
|
| Source: been next to locksmith opening a bank vault,
| _twice_ , in two different countries. Once for a bank
| belonging to a deceased family member (we had the key but
| not the three-letters combination) and once not because I
| lost my key but because the bank's lock (on my vault)
| went defective.
|
| So it's not "my key from the my vault at the bank melted
| during a housefire, so I can never access my vault at the
| bank anymore" nor is it _" I forgot my three-letters
| combination, so until the end of the universe that bank
| vault shall stay locked"_.
| Loughla wrote:
| We have keys. In the event those are lost or destroyed,
| they will provide access to an approved list of
| individuals and drill the lock for $40.
|
| Also they're small town banks, so that makes it easier as
| well. We don't really need to worry about providing ID,
| but if we did and couldn't access ID or something like
| that, we have four other people listed with access, one
| of which lives hours away in case of a disaster impacting
| everyone else on the list. They don't have keys but could
| get into it for us. So for a few hundred dollars, we're
| set and insured for the declared value of the contents of
| the boxes (250k max for another $15/year) if the banks
| are both destroyed as well!
| tmoertel wrote:
| > I am very anti black and yellow tubs.
|
| Would you mind sharing more about these tubs and why you
| are against them?
| DonHopkins wrote:
| I've seen Breaking Bad. They're a hell of a lot better
| than a porcelain bathtub for dissolving bodies!
| fragmede wrote:
| https://www.homedepot.com/p/HDX-27-Gal-Tough-Storage-
| Tote-in...
|
| As to why they're against them, I don't know their
| reason, but there used to be only one size of tote. There
| there was big and small. And then, for some fxcking
| reason, they decided to make ones that were roughly as
| big as the big ones. Just enough that you have to take
| half a second to re-eyeball-ruler measure them. But in
| isolation, if you've got one in front of you, you can't
| know if it'll tetris properly with another one until
| they're side-by-side and it turns out they're not.
|
| Dumbest decision ever.
|
| At least they come in transparent now though
| repiret wrote:
| My insurance agent has recommended that once a year or so I
| carefully walk through the house with a video recorder,
| opening every cabinet and drawer and tool box and so on.
| It's easier than constructing a detailed inventory, but
| gives you the raw data you need to construct one in the
| unlikely even that you need it.
| j1elo wrote:
| I gues the key here is where do you store that video!
| direwolf20 wrote:
| Apple iCloud, because most people are not using secure
| tech.
| ThePowerOfFuet wrote:
| >put in a ziplock bag in a fireproof, waterproof safe
|
| In the event of a fire, the bag will melt and coat
| everything in plastic. This may be undesirable.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| That inventory will be available for seizure by court order
| for any variety of reasons, and you won't ever know about it
| until it's too late.
|
| Something you keep in your home that no one knows about won't
| be inventoried.
| syntaxing wrote:
| I know there's metal plates you can self stamp for crypto
| wallets. I'm sure you can do the same for this purpose.
| 8n4vidtmkvmk wrote:
| Yes but your house has to burn down _and_ you have to
| simultaneously lose your memory.
|
| If your house and PC burn, restore from online backup.
|
| If your brain burns, spouse restores from vault.
| qwertfisch wrote:
| This assumes having a spouse.
| hdjrudni wrote:
| Sure... if you don't have a spouse, leave it with a
| sibling. I put my Bitcoin key in my brother's safe. And
| if you don't have a sibling or parent or best friend, you
| can usually rent a locker at a bank.
| kmoser wrote:
| s/spouse/executor/
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Only thing about safe deposit boxes - make sure that things
| needed in the event of your death, especially your will, are
| not there.
|
| The bank will seal the box as soon as they discover you are
| dead, and require a court order. Without a will, the executor
| will be whatever statutory person your state calls for.
| victorbjorklund wrote:
| Yea, bankbox is probably the best choice. In the extremely
| unlikely case the bank box gets robbed you will find out
| about it and can rotate the key.
| duskdozer wrote:
| >robust
|
| Is there a better class of safe one could use that might be
| more successful even if not a guarantee? F/e even with a safe
| deposit box, one might still have some lower-tier items that
| would be impractical to store in one but you might want to do
| better than just out in the open.
| eljojo wrote:
| sometimes simpler is the best. I am always on the move so
| vaults don't jive well with me. my concern would be for
| something to still happen to it, too. I'm trying to go by the
| principle of not putting all my eggs on one basket.
| tempestn wrote:
| I'd advise sharing that knowledge with one trusted person
| outside your household too, especially if you and your partner
| have dependants.
| lucenet wrote:
| Write down the password, print out recovery codes. Store them in
| separate buildings.
|
| Tell someone you trust about where you left these pieces of
| paper.
| notepad0x90 wrote:
| a safe-deposit box at a bank works ok too.
| registeredcorn wrote:
| I explicitly make it so I _cannot_ regain access to my computer
| in the event that my memory becomes faulty.
|
| I would be in an impaired state, and cannot function in way that
| would be conducive to either work or pleasure in terms of
| computer use.
|
| That is to say, the entire reason why I have password security at
| all is to keep out people who do not know the password. If
| someone does not know the password, they should not be able to
| access the system. That obviously and clearly applies to myself
| as much as any other person. "If you do not know it, then you do
| not need it."
| esafak wrote:
| No family, eh?
| seb1204 wrote:
| Maybe but does not want to share the pics or tax return.
| catlifeonmars wrote:
| What if you forgot your password but retained all other
| memories?
| eljojo wrote:
| asking the real questions here
| wavemode wrote:
| Well see, that's why I keep my "password" memory stored
| snugly next to "breathing" and other such. If I'm walking
| around conscious, then I must still know my password.
| fragmede wrote:
| I must have missed that option in the character creation
| part of being born (along with choosing my parents). For
| the record, human memory doesn't actually work in practice.
| It's unbelievably uncommon, but TBI have weird effects.
| saltcured wrote:
| I agree in broad strokes. If I am incapacitated, that is when
| things like durable power-of-attorney, medical advance
| directives, and living trusts come into play.
|
| The important thing is to ensuring your computer is not a
| single point of failure. Instead of losing a password, you
| could have theft, flood, fire, etc. Or for online accounts, you
| are one vendor move away from losing things. None of these
| should be precious and impossible to replace. I've been on the
| other side of this, and I think the better flow is to terminate
| or transfer accounts, and wipe and recycle personal devices.
|
| A better use of your time is to set up a disaster-recovery plan
| you can write down and share with people you trust. Distribute
| copies of important data to make a resilient archive. This
| could include confidential records, but shouldn't really need
| to include authentication "secrets".
|
| Don't expect others to "impersonate" you. Delegate them proper
| access via technical and/or legal methods, as appropriate. Get
| some basic legal advice and put your affairs in order. Write
| down instructions for your wishes and the "treasure map" to
| help your survivors or caregivers figure out how to use the
| properly delegated authority.
| BoredPositron wrote:
| Yubikey
| nippoo wrote:
| This kind of thing, widely implemented, would be a game-changer
| for dealing with assets after someone's death! I maintain my
| family's IT infrastructure (Google Enterprise admin, webserver
| etc) and I've been tempted to write down 1/4 of my password
| manager root password and give it to each of my family members -
| but then we run into the problem where if any one of them loses
| their shard, it's unrecoverable. Some kind of ECC would be great
| - ideally where I could print it out onto various bits of paper
| with a user-definable redundancy, or better still, some kind of
| reciprocal system where (say) 8/10 members of a trusted friend
| group/family ring could unlock any other member's password...
| rcxdude wrote:
| Shamir secret sharing is the cryptographic thing that you want.
| You can can configure any M of N to be needed to recover the
| underlying secret.
|
| (If you have a trusted third party, you can also enforce a
| cooling off period: e.g. that any attempt to access results in
| a notification to the account holder that if not denied within
| some time period, access is granted)
| nandomrumber wrote:
| You can give your password, or part of it, to your estate
| lawyer to attach to your will.
|
| This is obviously more cumbersome, and probably costly, if you
| intend on changing your password. I guess you could change the
| part of it you don't store with them.
| eljojo wrote:
| yes! I am starting to do some planning on that myself, that's
| why I'm in that kind of mindset. If you know more people in
| this space, please share this with them! would love to get
| feedback
| cyphar wrote:
| I wrote a project to do this a few years ago[1], it's mainly
| missing an automated mechanism to scan the PDFs and a GUI.
| Maybe you'll find it interesting.
|
| [1]: https://github.com/cyphar/paperback
| eljojo wrote:
| hey, this is a great idea! I'll link into your app from my
| readme. I really like that the PDF contains the entire
| dataset, not just the keys. I see lots of little details
| around organizing the PDFs, like document hashes, etc, very
| nice job!
|
| Since you wrote it in Rust, I'd suggest compiling it to
| wasm and releasing a browser-based version
| cyphar wrote:
| > Since you wrote it in Rust, I'd suggest compiling it to
| wasm and releasing a browser-based version
|
| That was my eventual plan for having a single GUI for
| everything, the only problem is that there isn't a really
| obvious way to support scanning a PDF you upload --
| basically you need a pure-Rust PDF renderer and there
| isn't one up to the task as far as I could tell. On
| mobile you could scan each QR code separately (though
| doing this from a webapp is probably going to be a fairly
| awful UX and most people would prefer to photograph the
| whole document and get everything scanned automatically).
| tmpfs wrote:
| We care about this porblem and are actively working on it, like
| the OP we also settled on shamirs secret sharing with a time
| lock mechanism.
|
| However, there is still the issue of the service provider going
| offline or out of business which we don't have a solution for
| yet.
|
| We have started with a good password manager and will be adding
| digital inheritance/social recovery soon! [0]
|
| Take a look, thoughts and feedback welcome.
|
| [0]: https://saveoursecrets.com
| eljojo wrote:
| services going offline is a big concern for me! that's why my
| solution is offline first, I like the idea of the encrypted
| backup living in my friend's email inbox and working entirely
| without internet. a true hard copy.
|
| for the time lock mechanism, how do you go about it? I'm
| interested in exploring using drand time lock, but that also
| relies on the service continuing to run (which is admittedly
| very likely) https://github.com/drand/tlock
| ezwoodland wrote:
| Something along the lines of reed-solomon codes could work for
| you:
|
| If you want to share your password with M family members such
| that you only need N to agree to recover the original:
|
| Split your password into ordered chunks.
|
| Make a polynomial p, of power N where the p(1) = chunk1, p(2) =
| chunk2, ...
|
| Evaluate the polynomial at M other points: p(N+1),p(N+2)...
|
| Gives those M new points to your family along with their index
| (+1,+2,...).
|
| If less than N family members get together, they will not be
| able to figure out the password much better than guessing. If N
| get together, they can interpolate their points to form the
| unique polynomial which will match p. Then evaluate p at
| p(1),p(2),... to get your original password.
|
| If you put the whole password into 1 chunk, and pad the
| polynomial with random extra coefficients or points to make the
| polynomial of sufficient degree, then they get literally no
| information on the password without having at least N
| cooperate. If you make multiple chunks then they can do a
| little correlation between the chunks without knowing the whole
| thing.
|
| This is sufficiently simple you can even work this out by hand
| without a computer, though it would be somewhat tedious.
| octoberfranklin wrote:
| Reed-Solomon is error correction, not encryption.
| gomox wrote:
| Don't worry even if your heirs have the password, it's
| extremely likely that Google will find the login attempts
| "suspicious" and try to verify your identity by sending SMS
| codes to a phone number you last had in 2005, despite your best
| attempts to prevent it.
| lucb1e wrote:
| A quarter of your password manager's password means it needs to
| be really long for it to not be bruteforceable if one or two
| quarters are recovered (on the order of at least 24 completely
| random alphanumeric characters)
|
| Shamir's secret sharing scheme does not allow anyone to
| bruteforce it, no matter if they have 99 out of the 100
| required pieces that unlock a 10-character password. If you
| want to do this sort of thing, I would recommend using a secret
| sharing scheme instead
| cyphar wrote:
| There are much better systems for splitting data than just
| chunking it into N chunks, the most common is Shamir Secret
| Sharing[1] (the main benefit being that you can construct an
| M-of-N scheme easily _and_ having N-1 shards provides you zero
| information about the secret). One word of caution -- a lot of
| software developers get enamored by the idea of information-
| theoretic security when they first run into it, but you
| eventually realise that useful applications of tools like SSS
| are actually quite rare.
|
| Shameless plug: I wrote a project a few years ago to create
| PDF-based backups with sharded keys which would do exactly what
| I suspect you want[2], unfortunately I got stuck at the "make a
| nice UI for it" stage (everything works but it's just a CLI
| tool at the moment). I guess I should take a look at using an
| LLM for that these days... (I used this to store my password
| manager root password and necessary keys to pull and decrypt
| the encrypted backups of my server.)
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamir%27s_secret_sharing
| [2]: https://github.com/cyphar/paperback/
| JTbane wrote:
| master password on paper hard copy
| eljojo wrote:
| that's so scary though! what if someone has access to it? or it
| gets lost when you need it?
| seb1204 wrote:
| I think this is when you need to evaluate your thread
| scenario. A) self-made crypto accessible through web or
| browser that any cracker can find through www and use machine
| clusters to run on or AI to work on etc. B) physical home
| invasion that are interested in one of your A4 papers with
| some random words that have only meaning to you and few
| trustees.
| 9x39 wrote:
| Well, there's power of attorney, which centralizes massive
| authority over your life with someone else, and yet people do
| so because when you pick right, it's a useful system.
|
| I'm trying to think of how this survives friends (who come
| and go in your life) having to coordinate. Then again, some
| people really did have PGP key signing parties...
| rawgabbit wrote:
| For my personal passwords, I use Apple's password manager. It
| lets me share passwords with my family. I also created a folder
| on Apple's iCloud that I share.
|
| https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/share-passwords-iphe6...
|
| https://support.apple.com/guide/icloud/share-files-and-folde...
| politelemon wrote:
| Despite the convenience factor, it isn't great to use a manager
| tied into your own ecosystem. It should exist outside, with the
| minor factor of lesser convenience.
| eljojo wrote:
| I've been so tempted to try out the apple password manager, I'm
| fully vested in their ecosystem, but the lock in is too big for
| me to feel comfortable with.
|
| This is the sort of stuff that terrifies me
| https://hey.paris/posts/appleid/
| rawgabbit wrote:
| It also terrifies me. The best solution I can come up is to
| export out my passwords to a thumb drive every few months.
| croisillon wrote:
| i thought 3M had already invented the best password safe ;)
| ddtaylor wrote:
| I think 3M also sells a $5 wrench.
| eljojo wrote:
| lol i'm so neurodivergent i had to read this 5 times to
| understand 3M didn't just get into the encryption business
| lucb1e wrote:
| Want to clue a brother in?
|
| Edit: wait, sticky notes maybe? I thought they were a tape
| company (I'm not sure they're active in my country) but it
| just occurred to me that maybe they sell other office
| supplies as well
| croisillon wrote:
| Yes, Post-It(tm), where people famously write passwords
| down
| cbabraham wrote:
| aw, friend of mine built this way back in the day
|
| https://michael-solomon.net/keybearer
|
| https://github.com/msolomon/keybearer
| eljojo wrote:
| no way!!!! I searched for a long time for a solution like this,
| many could encrypt using shamir but none took an actual file
| with browser upload and easy UX. and like, 14 years ago? my
| hats down to you my friend.
|
| my zip bundles are 1-2 megabytes due to all the wasm, and you
| achieved this on so little. impressive job!
|
| I'd love to hear what you think about mine, one of the
| differences is that it creates a ZIP file containing the
| recovery app in it, as well as a PDF with instructions for non-
| technical friends. Overall trying to make the recovery
| experience as smooth as possible.
|
| but cheers, your version is the only one that I found that does
| basically what mine does, all the others fall short one way or
| another!
| thephyber wrote:
| I wonder how many thousands or millions of useful projects
| are so well hidden that they are effectively nonexistent.
| eljojo wrote:
| you know, I've always thought that "If I know I have
| something... somewhere, but I don't know where that thing
| is is, I have effectively lost it"
| mohn wrote:
| I agree with the sentiment, and the specific wording of
| your comment made me want to link to the classic bash.org
| quote[0] which has consistently been in the top 5 for a
| long time, but I just learned that we lost bash.org... :(
|
| [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20230610235249/http://bas
| h.org/?...
| eljojo wrote:
| ayyyyyyyyyyyy lmao 100%
|
| also RIP bash.org found out thru you :(
| econ wrote:
| I like it. Perhaps you can use a weird idea of mine.
|
| You can discard/modify part of a password before sending it to
| your backend. Then, when you log in the server has to brute force
| the missing part.
|
| One could extend this with security questions like how many
| children pets and cars you own. What color was your car in 2024.
| Use that data to aid brute forcing.
|
| The goal would be to be able to decrypt with fewer than 5 shards
| but make it as computation heavy as you like. If no one remembers
| the pink car it will take x hours longer.
| eljojo wrote:
| ohhhh that's brutal haha! for context my app runs entirely
| clientside, but I get it, it's an interesting idea...
| econ wrote:
| I wonder if they even need a file. They could pick some
| question and type their secret into the app, something like
| the name of their first date etc
|
| If you are to hand out files maybe it is wonderful to write
| them a letter that serves as their shard? They might actually
| store it some place safe and it wouldn't scream I'M A SECRET!
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| That is a neat take on "key strengthening", or "peppering":
|
| https://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/20578/definition-...
| lucb1e wrote:
| That sounds like a roundabout way of doing security
| questions...
| https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/186297/do-secur...
| digiown wrote:
| This makes little sense, IMO. Information is information. There
| is no difference between this and just having a short/simple
| passphrase with the PKBDF iterations turned very high. You
| might as well shard secrets using Shamir and encode it via a
| modified version of BIP32 words.
| econ wrote:
| I'm no crypto expert, just fooling around.
|
| The security questions are like extra shares of lower value.
|
| My mental model is something like burying the password in
| your 100x100 yard. You give one friend the X and a different
| friend the Y coordinates both rounded down to a multiple of
| 10 meters. The security questions can be added to the X and Y
| coordinates.
|
| X = 30 + 2 + 3 + 1
|
| Y = ?? + 3 + 5 + 1
|
| You only have to dig 9 holes now.
| cedws wrote:
| I also gave this problem some thought:
| https://github.com/cedws/amnesia
| eljojo wrote:
| oh hey, nice timing! good name too, I see we're both on the
| same wavelength there. I'll link you from my readme!
| gingerlime wrote:
| Other than passwords though, I also have stuff installed at home
| on a Synology NAS, a mail server, a VPS running some websites (my
| own, family, my wife's), Home Assistant, Family photos with
| backups etc etc.
|
| I wonder who would not only have the passwords, but the know-how
| to manage the whole thing, at least to transition it to more
| managed services...
| thephyber wrote:
| Don't assume that anyone can.
|
| If you want someone to be able to access it after you're gone,
| either put 1000 BTC in it or leave instructions. Paper
| instructions in a physical fireproof safe is way easier to deal
| with than any digital encryption with no hints.
| eljojo wrote:
| you're completely right! the app actually guides you on some of
| that, it generates a readme that gives you advise on what to
| document, but I agree you can't be too careful here, the
| passwords IS NOT ENOUGH.
|
| You need to give people "a map" of where things are:
| https://github.com/eljojo/rememory/blob/main/internal/projec...
| reddalo wrote:
| Me too. I'm starting to self-host more and more services for
| both me and my family, and I wonder what would happen should I
| meet a bus in a front-facing way.
| Terr_ wrote:
| I think that boils down to having a checklist addendum to go
| with your will, an outline of accounts and data to rescue.
| rkagerer wrote:
| Nice! Good to see some tooling in this space explicitly designed
| for simplicity and user-friendliness.
|
| One practical problem to consider is the risk of those
| distributed bundles all ending up on one or two major cloud
| provider's infra because your friends happened to store them
| someplace that got scooped up by OneDrive, GDrive, etc. Then
| instead of the assumed _< threshold>_ friends being required for
| recovery, your posture is subtley degraded to some smaller number
| of hacked cloud providers.
|
| Someone using your tool can obviously mitigate by distributing on
| fixed media like USB keys (possibly multiple keys to each
| individual as consumer-grade units are notorious for becoming
| corrupted or failing after a time) along with custodial
| instructions. Some thought into longevity is helpful here - eg.
| rotating media out over the years as technology migrates (when
| USB drives become the new floppy disks) and testing new browsers
| still load up and correctly run your tool (WASM is still
| relatively new).
|
| Some protocol for confirming from time to time that your friends
| haven't lost their shares is also prudent. I always advise any
| disaster recovery plan that doesn't include semi-regular drills
| isn't a plan it's just hope. There's a reason militaries, first
| responders, disaster response agencies, etc. are always doing
| drills.
|
| I once designed something like this using sealed paper cards in
| identified sequence - think something like the nuclear codes you
| see in movies. Annually you call each custodian and get them to
| break open the next one and read out the code, which attests
| their share hasn't been lost or damaged. The routine also keeps
| them tuned in so they don't just stuff your stuff in an attic and
| forget about it, unable to find their piece when the time comes.
| In this context, it also happens to be a great way to dedicate
| some time once a year to catch up (eg. take the opportunity to
| really focus on your friend in an intentioned way, ask about
| what's going on in their life, etc).
|
| The rest of my comments are overkill but maybe fun to discuss
| from an academic perspective.
|
| Another edge case risk is of a flawed Shamir implementation. i.e.
| Some years from now, a bug or exploit is discovered affecting the
| library you're using to provide that algorithm. More
| sophisticated users who want to mitigate against that risk can
| further silo their sensitive info - eg. only include a master
| password and instructions in the Shamir-protected content. Put
| the data those gain access to somewhere else (obviously with
| redundancy) protected by different safeguards. Comes at the cost
| of added complexity (both for maintenance and recovery).
|
| Auditing to detect collusion is also something to think about in
| schemes like these (eg. somehow watermark the decrypted output to
| indicate which friends' shares were utilized for a particular
| recovery - but probably only useful if the watermarked stuff is
| likely to be conveyed outside the group of colluders). And
| timelocks to make wrench attacks less practical (likely requires
| some external process).
|
| Finally, who conducted your Security Audit? It looks to me as if
| someone internal (possibly with the help of AI?) basically put
| together a bunch of checks you can run on the source code using
| command line tools. There's definitely a ton of benefit to that
| (often the individuals closest to a system are best positioned to
| find weaknesses if given the time to do so) and it's nice that
| the commands are constructed in a way other developers are likely
| to understand if they want to perform their own review. But might
| be a little misleading to call it an "audit", a term typically
| taken to mean some outside professional agency is conducting an
| independent and thorough review and formally signing off on their
| findings.
|
| Also those audit steps look pretty Linux-centric (eg. Verify
| Share Permissions / 0600, symlink handling). Is it intended
| development only take place on that platform?
|
| Again, thanks for sharing and best of luck with your project!
| 2color wrote:
| I like that more people are thinking solving some of the problems
| of digital inheritance we face. These are problems that are so
| important now that so much of our lives are digital and tapping
| into ones actual social circle seems the best way to do this.
|
| Also, kudos for packaging it as a static web app. That's the one
| platform I'm willing to bet will still function in 10 years.
| lucb1e wrote:
| As someone who still plays Windows games from 30 years ago and
| Flash games from ~20 years ago, I'd not be so pessimistic about
| other platforms, at least when there is no negative sentiment
| towards it and a good track record of stability. Not to say
| that the web is not among the best choices
| mikkupikku wrote:
| I'm a firm believer in passwords on sticky notes.
|
| _(At home of course, people get pissy if you do this at work!)_
| Yodel0914 wrote:
| We use Vaultwarden and Bitwarden to share passwords with the
| family. My wife has my master password and I have hers.
|
| The bigger issue if I drop dead is all the nontrivial tech crap I
| have set up (self hosted Vaultwarden included...).
| karussell wrote:
| Honest question: what is the benefit of such a specialized
| service compared to just an encrypted file with all your
| passwords that you share via some common file sharing service
| (hosted or self-hosted)
| mawax wrote:
| A few years ago I switched from KeePass, with the database
| stored in Dropbox, to a SaaS password manager. My primary
| reasons where:
|
| - No more sync conflicts when using multiple devices
|
| - Backups are taken care off
|
| - It's harder to steal the database
|
| - Slightly better browser and mobile extensions for auto-
| filling passwords
| rektlessness wrote:
| As our identities get more fragmented across devices, clouds, and
| cranial volatility, I expect digital wills that withstand real-
| world decay to become the norm.
| kzalesak wrote:
| Thank you for this tool. We have been looking at shamir schemes
| in our org for encrypting backup, and decided against it for the
| reasons of being too complicated. Maybe it is time to revisit it
| again.
| Terr_ wrote:
| The "lost my memory" scenario differs a bit from death/succession
| planning in that you can use biometrics... but IMO it's better to
| jump straight to the latter and concuss two birds with one stone.
| octoberfranklin wrote:
| Shamir Secret Sharing is _notoriously_ difficult to implement
| correctly, and even the smallest most subtle bugs result in total
| compromise.
|
| Consider whether you really need this.
|
| Doing 7-choose-5 separate multiparty encryptions is way harder to
| screw up. Is having to produce 42 ciphertexts really a
| dealbreaker?
| kortex wrote:
| They are using the Hashicorp Vault implementation, and it's
| been around for years. I think we can safely say they know what
| they are doing.
| aforwardslash wrote:
| 5 out of 7 means you cannot be in an eg. car accident with more
| than 2 of them at a time, if there is the possibility of all of
| them present in the car not surviving.
|
| Im also quite more practical - there are responsabilities that
| may go beyond a simple memory loss - eg. If one is in a coma or
| just hospitalized for a long period of time; trusted third
| parties may require access to your accounts even for simple stuff
| like paying bills/rent/cloud services.
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| Dead man's switch doesn't necessarily mean the operator has
| expired
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_man's_switch
|
| They are an important feature in autonomous systems, critical
| equipment, and deterrents. =3
| mhb wrote:
| Step 1. Get 7 friends
| ShrootBuck wrote:
| I have to say, this is a very cool project, and I love how
| everything you need is packaged up nicely for distribution
| crazygringo wrote:
| TouchID is a good starting point... though it does confirm your
| password weekly.
|
| Somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but if I lose my memory, how am I
| supposed to remember the 7 (or 5) friends who have my
| password...?
|
| Somewhat less tongue-in-cheek, if you _really_ wanted to be
| serious about your friends not being able to produce your
| password _now_ for the lolz, then you 'd actually want to ensure
| they were merely acquaintances who didn't know each other and
| couldn't find each other, e.g. not all Facebook friends. In which
| case the list of friends becomes essentially as important as the
| password, and then how do you remember where you've stored that
| list?
|
| In reality, hopefully you can just entrust your master password
| with your closest family (spouse, parent, adult children),
| assuming they're not going to drain your bank account or read
| your private digital journal.
| unbad505 wrote:
| I just keep my password manager password hidden in a journal
| 0gs wrote:
| sorry if i missed this question. how do you remember you have
| this vault?
| eljojo wrote:
| i tell my friends about it, so they remind me in case I lose my
| memory
| 0gs wrote:
| sorry if i missed this elsewhere: how do you remind yourself this
| vault exists? do you have to explain the whole thing to your 7
| lifelines?
| Brajeshwar wrote:
| Start treating the Future-You like a Stranger. Write for that
| stranger, your Future-You will thank you. We think we will
| remember, but we won't. So, don't be too harsh on yourself and
| make it easier for your future-you. If that stranger finds it
| easier, it will also be for others; your relatives, kids, etc.
|
| Unless your work and life need to be very secretive, or involve
| matters of national or international importance, I personally
| think a simpler printed/written format that works without
| electronics/Internet would be a better option. Of course, the
| printed details can have simple encryption, which your
| family/friends can break using day-to-day quirks you shared, such
| as the family secret codes, the name of that pet in the town you
| grew up in, or the middle name from the story of your great-
| grandfather, etc.
|
| Some time ago, my mother-in-law (erstwhile teacher) and my
| godmother-aunty (businesswoman) began to forget many things.
| Their kids have tried quite a few phone apps and whatnot with
| electronics. Finally, I have suggested enforcing just two things:
| a lot of Valet bowls around the house (at common places in all
| the rooms) and pocket notebooks with pens attached. They just
| write anything and everything, from money to kitchen items to
| anything they want. If they forgot something, refer to the
| notebooks. If a key is lost, try the Valet Bowl. Now, my plan is
| to train their muscle memory to drop/pick from the bowl (don't
| try to remember) and write things down.
|
| The idea of Valet Bowls comes from something someone mentioned on
| Hacker News.
| cyode wrote:
| This comment right?
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41220059
|
| (Funny how I can remember this comment from many months ago
| after never implementing the bowls, but I currently can't
| remember where my car keys are. Should have implemented the
| bowls...)
| Brajeshwar wrote:
| Oh God, Yes. Now, in my favorited posts and comments.
|
| For keys, there is only one place: the Keyholder wall-mounted
| near the main door, while still visible from the main Hall.
| Not easy to pick and go by "guests" without being seen by
| someone, but easy for residents to just walk out with one. I
| got the exact same ones from Amazon and wall-mounted them in
| all the homes where I serve as Printer-Repair Guy. 10+ years,
| I kinda have trained every family member's muscle memory,
| "Keys go there and only there." ;-)
|
| Add/Edit: I also have a sticker I printed stuck to the
| Keyholder, in Monica's words from Friends, "Got the Keys?"
| thebruce87m wrote:
| "A place for everything and everything in its place"
| hoppp wrote:
| I talk to future me in code comments all the time and future me
| really appreciates past me for doing that.
|
| Thank you past me for thinking about future me. Present me
| happy.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| I consider learning the joy of receiving gifts from my past
| self to be a major point of career and life development.
| seized wrote:
| Look at Bitwardens Emergency Access:
|
| https://bitwarden.com/help/emergency-access/
|
| Would also cover banking details or whatever else you want to put
| in there.
| csullivannet wrote:
| > Trusted emergency contacts must be existing Bitwarden users
|
| While the motivation is similar this basically kills the
| feature. It requires that your friends not only use but
| continue to maintain their accounts.
|
| From my understanding of OP's implementation, being completely
| offline they can basically just keep the key on a USB or file
| store of any kind.
|
| Personally I think the most robust solution is single key
| access (a la emergency kit), distributed in one or more secure
| bank vaults for redundancy (many still do offer these for free
| or cheaply for small boxes). Put instructions in your (living)
| will and done.
| hypeatei wrote:
| > just keep the key on a USB or file store of any kind
|
| Similar arguments could be made against this too: trusted
| contacts need to make sure the USB isn't damaged or lost and
| that the files haven't been corrupted. At the end of the day,
| these types of recovery flows require some level of
| engagement which in itself is an issue since human beings are
| very flawed.
| KevinChasse wrote:
| Interesting approach. I like that this is explicit about human
| recovery rather than pretending crypto alone solves catastrophe.
| That said, this design and fully stateless systems like mine
| (deterministic derivation, no escrow) are solving opposite
| failure modes. Shamir-based social recovery assumes: trusted
| third parties remain reachable, they are willing and able to
| cooperate, and that recovery is an exceptional event. Stateless
| systems assume the inverse: no one can be relied on, recovery is
| impossible by design, and the primary threat is silent compromise
| rather than lockout. Neither is "better" universally; they're
| value judgments. What I appreciate here is that the tradeoffs are
| made explicit instead of buried behind UX. One open question I'd
| be curious about: how you reason about coercion risk over time
| (friends change, incentives change), and whether you see this as
| something users should periodically re-shard as relationships
| evolve.
| eljojo wrote:
| thanks for your thorough review and congrats on your launch!
| for my personal use case, I'm not worried about coercion, but
| many have highlighted it as a real risk. my answer to that is
| to do what you suggest: update my contact list yearly, send new
| ZIP files with bundles, and ask them to delete the previous
| ones.
| joeframbach wrote:
| See also: Horcrux. https://github.com/jefdaj/horcrux
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I still remember regions!
|
| https://www.folklore.org/I_Still_Remember_Regions.html
| eljojo wrote:
| great story :')
| utopiah wrote:
| Ah, I actually did something similar years ago. I basically
| hashed individual pages of my wiki and I think I published the
| hash of hashes on the Blockchain. Anyway I didn't need it and
| stop maintaining that system but definitely interesting
| explorations.
|
| To clarify the hashing was to verify that the pages were indeed
| modified by me, to prevent tempering.
|
| Damn, found it back, was in 2011!
|
| in English https://fabien.benetou.fr/Slideshows/MemoryLoss
|
| in French https://fabien.benetou.fr/Slideshows/MemoryLossPES
| utopiah wrote:
| FWIW as I commented just earlier if you have to verify without
| relying on memory nor a public note (e.g. sticker on screen)
| that others could use to pollute your data then use a biometric
| mechanism, e.g. YubiKey Bio.
| procaryote wrote:
| A lower tech version would be to pick a very long recovery
| passphrase, cut it in two or three and give it to two or three
| friends. It doesn't give you N out of M, but it will be good
| enough for a lot of real world scenarios
| konha wrote:
| I don't know. Depending on how much time passes between now and
| the moment you try to recover the key I bet at least one of
| your friends will have misplaced or lost that piece of paper.
| sjducb wrote:
| This could be a useful tool for putting self hosted Bitcoin in a
| will.
|
| If you self host then die no one can access your coins. Lawyers
| don't want to be trusted with copies of secret phrases because of
| liability if the bitcoin gets stolen. If you encrypt the bitcoin
| recovery info across several files you can give part to the
| lawyer and part to different beneficiaries.
| nesk_ wrote:
| I've been searching for a solution to let my wife have access to
| my master password if I die someday. This is definitely something
| that could work, thank you!
| trueismywork wrote:
| Very cool, but I must say the best way is still a paper with
| master password in a bank locker. May be distributed it if needed
| gor additional security.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| > 5 out of 7
|
| too high
| mjanx123 wrote:
| A sticker with your password to the monitor, like everybody else
| fragmede wrote:
| That's stupid! I put mine under the keyboard. Way more secure
| :p
| ninalanyon wrote:
| I know that you and the person you are responding to are
| joking (probably) but this does in fact seem like a much
| simpler way of solving the problem and really not much less
| secure if we are talking about a home computer.
| utopiah wrote:
| At least if you go that route use a biometric authentication
| mechanism, e.g. YubiKey Bio.
| generic92034 wrote:
| I personally do not really care if my relatives are able to
| access everything I was able to access once I am dead or forget
| everything. But they should be able to access anything of
| monetary worth.
|
| So, without any crypto my belongings are either real estate or
| depots and accounts at banks. Both can easily be discovered in
| case of my death. I think there is a similar discovery process if
| I am subject to guardianship (permanently).
| scaradim wrote:
| goal for the rest of your life: prepare and leave after your
| death more that real estate and bank accounts to your relatives
| and friends.
| generic92034 wrote:
| I am already doing this with our shared experiences and
| memories. But why do I need to add my online activities to
| that? I see no good reason.
| kunley wrote:
| The idea is very noble.
|
| In am just thinking about the number of 5, who these times has
| really five trustable friends not just acquaintances or people
| bound by some specific activity perishing over time. I am afraid,
| for most people in the digital era this number is much lower (and
| I am certainly not speaking for myself now).
| eljojo wrote:
| "who has five friends?" has been the number one comment I've
| received on this, by far. a bubble just popped for me
| kortex wrote:
| You should add a feature where you can select the
| shares/threshold, with 3/5 being the default.
|
| edit: d'oh! you do, I didn't get that far into using it yet
| cause I was on mobile.
| fruitworks wrote:
| What technique did you use for the timelock encryption?
| eljojo wrote:
| I don't have timelock encryption, but have been looking into
| integrating https://docs.drand.love/docs/timelock-
| encryption/#use-cases
| commandersaki wrote:
| We need a standard or reference for an SSS combined encryption
| mechanism. It definitely has value, but I don't think anyone will
| trust a single lonesome implementation no matter how good it is.
| meander_water wrote:
| Seems similar to a Show HN from 5 years ago:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26256726
|
| I gotta say Horcrux is a catchier name ;)
| nmstoker wrote:
| Definitely catchier name!
| kortex wrote:
| Until you get sued by JK Rowling. Unlikely? sure, but I wanted
| to decouple for other reasons.
|
| That's why i went with PassCrux for mine. Can't argue that it's
| too close, since "crux" is just latin for cross, as in "crux of
| the matter" (JK likely invented horcrux as a portmanteau of
| horror + crux).
|
| https://github.com/xkortex/passcrux
| nubinetwork wrote:
| If you're not encrypting your hard drive, cracking a local
| Windows password is easy... Linux is even easier, but you just
| need a livecd to get back in either way...
|
| Online accounts on the other hand... I hope you used something
| like lastpass. :)
|
| Honestly, anything more than this is completely overkill.
| graemep wrote:
| That is why you should be encrypting your hard drive. You do
| not want it to be that easy.
| mdavid626 wrote:
| Sticky notes?
| vladde wrote:
| then your friends conspire together against you and gain access
| to your system on their own /j
| giantfrog wrote:
| This system introduces a fun question: What's more likely, that
| you suffer total spontaneous memory loss or your best friends
| betray you?
| Schmerika wrote:
| I think you'd have to plot a curve based on the potential
| reward of betrayal... I suspect that many Americans* would have
| their 5th closest friends committed or worse for low 6 figures.
| If in ~dire straits, as about half all Americans are, that
| number could get much lower.
|
| * If my use of the word 'Americans' above is triggering, feel
| free to substitute it with 'people'.
| whycombinetor wrote:
| Yea, this project gives less "my contract partners will
| benevolently read my diary after I die" than "enabling and
| incentivizing my closest friends to hold a vote to
| redistribute all my assets amongst themselves"
| ck2 wrote:
| not just illness but age too will "bitrot" your brain
|
| fifteen years ago I decided to fiddle around one winter and learn
| a newfangled thing called "bitcoin" and setup my computer to run
| 24/7 and heat my apartment as a benefit
|
| after mining a dozen coins which were worth next to nothing then,
| I gave up and took apart the PC and put it away
|
| fast-forward to 2020 and covid/long-covid has now rotted my
| brain, swiss-cheesed my mind to the point I cannot remember the
| password for the life of me
|
| I was too clever then for future me, and used a long passphrase
| that made funny sense then but beyond me now
|
| (they are worth over a million dollars at times now)
|
| In hindsight:
|
| go find a book in your library and pick a random page and write
| the password or a significant hint to the password on that page
| and then put it away (don't put any other indication on that
| paper)
| vulcan01 wrote:
| Libraries get rid of books in poor condition and loan books to
| other libraries, and patrons regularly fail to return books.
| knifeinhead wrote:
| Unfortunately, for this to work, you need friends...
| notesinthefield wrote:
| Things like biometrics and hardware keys make this an easy fix -
| were they a consideration?
| kube-system wrote:
| If you are preparing for accidents where memory loss might be an
| issue you might also want to consider that you could quickly be
| in a situation where:
|
| * you forget that you have a clever password scheme
|
| * you forget that you have data to decrypt
|
| * your mental capacities are deteriorated enough that someone
| else takes over decisions making for you. This person may not
| know you or your data protection scheme.
|
| * you are physically injured where biometrics are non functional.
| Or a biometric system with a limit on tries may have been tripped
| by those trying to help you.
|
| * you were in an incident that your friends/family were also
| affected by
|
| In my opinion, the best way to protect against these is simply
| write stuff down in plaintext somewhere that relies on physical
| security, like with documents in your home. Also notate what they
| are and why someone would need to access them and how.
| kortex wrote:
| That's why you have a public-ish recovery guide for all the
| other steps.
| rodolphoarruda wrote:
| My family members know of my physical "red notebook" and its
| location. It has instructions on how to access my digital life on
| detail.
| kortex wrote:
| Glad to see this idea getting traction!
|
| Had the same idea years ago (same hashicorp lib too) but lost
| motivation to polish it to the point I felt confident enough to
| Show HN. https://github.com/xkortex/passcrux
|
| But given recent events, I want to restart work on it.
|
| My use-case revolved more around preserving a master password
| e.g. to a password manager. I also wanted to support self-hosted
| backup, like hiding shares and giving directions to the parts to
| trusted friends. The shamir sharing part was straightforward but
| i really want to add forward error-correction to protect against
| partial data loss.
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