221–230 of 243 posts
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…
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 ;)
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).
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?
A sticker with your password to the monitor, like everybody else
That's stupid! I put mine under the keyboard. Way more secure :p
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Gelsenkirchen_heist In December 2025, items worth an estimated €30 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.
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…
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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
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
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).
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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…
> I am very anti black and yellow tubs. Would you mind sharing more about these tubs and why you are against them?
The clear plastic is usually a bit thicker, and more rubberized — it'll still break, but more difficultly.
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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 i…
Reed-Solomon is error correction, not encryption.
"Do not roll your own crypto" though.
Specifically for my own memory problem I use a printed "random number pad" that is a 10x10 grid of characters. I keep a copy in the house and in the cloud.
I have a strong visual memory. I can remember shapes and images much better than words or strings. To reveal the password I need only recall the visual pattern and collect the characters underneath.