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Well, I always dreamt about encrypting my master keys to all my digital heritage with some threshold scheme encryption like Shamir's secret sharing. I believe there is some Linux tool available: http://point-at-infinity.org/ssss/
That way N out of M of my friends would have to gather after my passing, combine the puzzle pieces and be granted with access to my stuff.
There are easier ways, though. You can just write down a password and include it with your last will, seal it and have a notary take care of it. I'd create a seperate administrator account/password for that.
You could set up two factor authentification and give them one factor now, and have the other factor stored with your things so they can collect it after your passing. Doesn't need to be complicated, create a password with 30 characters, split it in the middle and you have two factors.
There are online services for these kind of things. Or you can run some dead man switch yourself. I'm not sure what kinds of projects someone would use for that. Taking care of a dead man switch would be annoying for me.
Great idea. My poor mans version idea was an encrypted data set inside another encrypted data set to require two people, but Shamir's seems like a much better option.
I'm still a bit split on this. And whether the complexity and reliability is good enough for the use case... I mean if you don't need N-out-of-M, but it's just two people: cut a password or key in half. Same if it's N-out-of-N people, you just need to make some puzzle pieces and hand them out, we don't really need encryption and fancy maths for that. But I guess encrypting something would work, too. Just use a program or algorithm that's likely still around when it's going to be used. And you can always add a sheet of paper or PDF with instructions. Maybe save the executable file to to decrypt it somewhere if the solution requires software.
Possibly dead, but a cool project none the less.
https://github.com/jesseduffield/horcrux
Nice. Thanks. Seems I've missed some Harry Potter themed stuff. That gave me an idea... Take (or write) an Arduino library (or SSS implemeted in plain C, instead of Go), flash it on a microcontroller like an ESP32 and you have some actual, physical horcroxes. I'd have to think about the form factor, and whether they need displays, or act as a USB thumb drive... But they could light up once you get like 3 of them in bluetooth proximity and reveal the secret. Other than that I think it needed to be part of some well-maintained password vault app. Or be a web service, so people don't need to worry to get some old computer code running.
Edit: Seems the Bitcoin people have had a thought at something like this: https://github.com/satoshilabs/slips/blob/master/slip-0039.md
Last release was over 5 years ago and judging by the issues not receiving responses best to assume it’s deprecated.
Cool project it seemed.
Yeah, I was looking at the most recent commit being two years ago. Hadn't checked out the issues.
@ohshit604 @AbidanYre Nah, they are still doing releases, but they're hidden. You have to combine the past few releases to unlock the url for the latest release.
[I'm joking, of course.]
I wonder if you could make a dead man switch something more benign, like have it restart whenever you plug your phone in to charge, turn on a light switch, start a car, all three, etc
Sure. I believe that could be done with minimal effort. Either by a smarthome solution, a script on a wifi router, a script in the autostart of the laptop someone uses every day, or like tasker on a phone. But you need to get it right. Or it'll fire once you're on a 14 day trip through Europe (and absent from your house and computer), phones can be lost or replaced... You might move... And you kind of want to make sure it's robust enough so it actually works once needed, and that might be decades from now...
Film idea: guy loses phone on holiday and rushes to disable his dead man's switch