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Cheat sheet for if I'm gone

thoughtscollected.tech

51–60 of 194 posts

Re: Cheat sheet for if I'm gone

#51
post #28

I'm banking on the emergency access feature [1] of Bitwarden (available in self-hosted version too [2]). The "how it works" section has more information [3] but it essentially boils down to trusted individuals requesting access - which can be manually approved by account holder or they are automatically granted access after a pre-defined wait time. Bitwarden (paid version) also claims this - "If your premium features…

FYI: Bitwarden premium costs 10$ a year!

Oh? Do we like it better than last pass?

Re: Cheat sheet for if I'm gone

#53
post #36
post #28

I'm banking on the emergency access feature [1] of Bitwarden (available in self-hosted version too [2]). The "how it works" section has more information [3] but it essentially boils down to trusted individuals requesting access - which can be manually approved by account holder or they are automatically granted access after a pre-defined wait time. Bitwarden (paid version) also claims this - "If your premium features…

This means that the time delay could be theoretically bypassed by someone other than you (as time delay access is not a cryptographic construction), which means that someone else has access today (likely Bitwarden the company), which means the end-to-end encryption has been circumvented to enable this feature, which means they could be issued a search warrant to yield all of your passwords to law enforcement immediat…

But the wait time process only bypasses the manual approval step, not the private key step right? So you would still need a private key to initiate the time delay

Re: Cheat sheet for if I'm gone

#54
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The answer is shamir's secret sharing algorithm. Give a chunk of your password to N friends who you trust, with instructions to recombine it.

I've been (lightly) thinking about this with regard to digital identity. One of the few use cases that I find very compelling with regard to blockchain/web3 tech is as a means of ID/auth much in the same way that many sites now offer options to log in with FB/Google/etc. One big obstacle (I imagine, I haven't really looked into this that far) is that of the password reset. Some non-trivial amount of people will forge…

I think that blockchain is not the solution here. The fundamental problem is trust: do you or do you not trust n other parties with the information required to take over your digital life, no amount of fancy crypto engineering will get around that.

No amount if crypto will stand up to a Russian mobster with a crowbar and some creativity, like the xkcd https://xkcd.com/538/.

What you need is to develop a threat model and then select an appropriate solution that matches your threat model. If the threat is the KGB might torture me and my buddies, then kill switches are appropriate. Otherwise it’s no solution.

Perfect security doesn’t exist, it’s all about tradeoffs.

Re: Cheat sheet for if I'm gone

#55
I think the best place for most of that information is a keepass file stored in an E2E-encrypted cloud (the non-sensitive stuff should be known to more than one person in the household anyway - but if you're single it can be a good idea to leave a printed sheet with contacts for all the electricity,... suppliers somewhere in your flat). The main question is how do you keep the master password both safe and accessible in emergencies?

I see some people here suggested Samir Secret sharing which sounds like a great idea. But how do you make that practical for non-technical relatives?

Re: Cheat sheet for if I'm gone

#57
This resonate deeply for me.

My dad unexpectedly passed away recently, and there were a lot of problems because we didn't even know his phone unlock PIN (to be fair, he did told us several time, just that none of us bothered to remember). But one of the main problems is that tons of research fund is tied up in my dad account, so it's basically frozen until we can execute his will.

My mom manage my dad tax return so at least we think we know where all his money and debts are.

This event prompted most of my dad co-worker to create something like this cheat-sheet.

Re: Cheat sheet for if I'm gone

#58
I feel for this kind of stuff, you want to have a local, air gapped computer, maybe a Raspberry that has an encrypted drive. A little computer that is just going to work X years down the line.

Edit: Or alternatively, keep a printed document and copies of all of that in a bank vault. Document lockers cost less than 100EUR per year.

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