Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: If you lose your memory, how to regain access to your computer?

eljojo.github.io

51–60 of 243 posts

Re: Show HN: If you lose your memory, how to regain access to your computer?

#51

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…

What if you forgot your password but retained all other memories?

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.

Re: Show HN: If you lose your memory, how to regain access to your computer?

#52

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.

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.

Re: Show HN: If you lose your memory, how to regain access to your computer?

#53
post #44

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.

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…

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

Re: Show HN: If you lose your memory, how to regain access to your computer?

#54
post #44

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.

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…

Another solution is to engrave your secret on something that’s stable up to household fire temperatures.

Re: Show HN: If you lose your memory, how to regain access to your computer?

#55
post #16

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…

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

Re: Show HN: If you lose your memory, how to regain access to your computer?

#56
post #21
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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)

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…

Re: Show HN: If you lose your memory, how to regain access to your computer?

#57
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 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!

Re: Show HN: If you lose your memory, how to regain access to your computer?

#58
post #53
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: If you lose your memory, how to regain access to your computer?

#59
post #36
post #19

master password on paper hard copy

that's so scary though! what if someone has access to it? or it gets lost when you need it?

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.

Re: Show HN: If you lose your memory, how to regain access to your computer?

#60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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).
Post reply on HN