What will happen to your crypto-keys when you die?
I'm working out my will, power of attorney, literary executor and related logistics (I'm not sick or anything, it's just crazy to have a family and be intestate) and one thing that came up today is what to do with my GPG keys and (especially) the 128-bit AES keys on my user partitions on my various machines. Right now, I carry the passphrases around in my head, which is fine, unless I drop dead, get hit by a bus, etc.
What do you-all do with your cryptokeys? Keep 'em with a lawyer and hope that attorney-client privilege will protect them? Safe-deposit box? Friends? Under the mattress? Do you worry that if your friends have your keys, they can be subpoenaed or suborned?
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I've wondered about this as well.
Perhaps there could be some sort of digital-lock-box. You give your lawyer a password, and your power of attorney another password, and, if the time comes... they both enter their respective passkeys into the digital-lock-box and are given access to your crypto-keys.
But I'm just an illustrator, not a law-talking guy, so I really don't know.
http://www.yubico.com/
can I get them programmed into those embeddable RFID chips used to tag pets?
Couldn't you give him the location/safenumber of a usb stick with the passphrases and keys? This way s/he could say he is not in possession of them, but they would still have access.
Better yet, you could give the usb stick to the attorney with your passphrase and keys on it (with it encrypted with the friend's key). Instruct the attorney to not give to anyone but the friend. This way the attorney does not know what's on it and your friend can still have safe access to the keys.
Worse yet, when you get hit by a bus and lose them but you're still alive. That would suck.
I think secret treasure map with riddles only your family could answer in a letter held by your lawyer. X marks the spot.
Oh, or how about engraved on a piece of titanium that's embedded in your thigh. When they get the ashes they'll get the keys?! Bourne comes through again.
Encrypt them using the key of your executor(s), and give the encrypted file to an attorney (you might want to choose an alternate against whose key to encrypt them, too). That way the attorney's office will only release the information to the executor after your death, and the attorney won't be able to do anything with them without the executor's assistance.
Secret splitting. Use a scheme that has one required (like your attorney), and one of a pool of others (like relatives or an attorney in different jurisdictions) to reconstitute the key material.
There's a few software products and packages out there that do this.
I'm taking them to my grave, personally. Along with all my 53cr3t emailz and Amazon purchase history, too.
I'm thinking you should go with the passphrase written upon an ancient scroll, divided into quarters, and then placed under the protection of ancient guardians, each more dangerous than the last.
Or just stick it at the bottom of a shoebox with your wedding photos. Your wife will eventually dig them up again.
It's certainly an important question. My uncle died, and left no record of what his passwords are, only hints that made no sense to anyone else. So please, people, find some way to send these on to your relatives.
Personal suggestion? Stegged Family Photos. Leave your next(s) of kin a flash drive with de-stegging software and photos. Hopefully, one of them will put two and two together.
http://www.deathswitch.com/
"people can set up e-mails that will be sent out automatically if they don't check in at intervals they specify, like once a week"
I taught my kid how to boot into single-user mode.
I also taught him the Diffie-Hellman algorithm & the fundamentals of asymmetric encryption.
Seriously. He'll manage.
Before that, though, I had my root password, instructions on how to leverage that, and the names of tech-savvy friends who I trust in a sealed envelope in the fireproof safe in the cellar. You can use my name in your envelope if you want, Cory.
Have me reduced to hashes, then encrypted in a .jar
Put all your passwords in one text document and clone it to 5 drives. Take the drives to four people, and have each person encrypt the drives a different way, using a password of their choosing.
After each person has put their own encryption on each drive, give the drives to them, and put the extra in a safety deposit box out of state. None of the drives are readable without the information supplied by everyone, and have the encryption be such that even if it were down to the last level, it could not be decrypted without more computational power than the world currently has.
In the event that someone who has one of the passwords dies, redo the whole damn thing since you yourself cannot decrypt the drives.
Print them out on paper along with directions how to use them, where they go, etc. Place in a safe deposit box. All these puzzles are great but you'll be dead and family probably won't be in a mood for a maze of twisty little passages. You just need to make sure that when you die they have access to that safe deposit box.
Hi Cory,
I think that I have a suggestion that may be helpful. Bare with me, it's a bit involved. My suggestion should provide you with an adequate amount of protection. It will require reasonable trade offs that you probably take on a daily basis anyway.
I would encrypt a file (symmetric or asymmetric encryption) with an entirely random passphrase. If you choose to use asymmetric cryptography, I would ensure that your secret key is stored separately from your encrypted document and that the secret key is kept separately from the passphrase.
However, the passphrase (and/or secret key material) creates a single point of failure that is difficult to overcome. Thus, I suggest that you diversify your secrets so that no single party may betray you.
In the past, I wrote an article (that should easily work for an Ubuntu user) about a tool called 'ssss' that implements a concept called Shamir's Secret Sharing Scheme. SSSS splits a secret into n shares and you decide how many shares are required to reconstruct the message.
Who's Shamir? He's the S in RSA. His idea is pretty great and it's also pretty simple when you grok the concept.
To utilize any implementation of SSS, you need a plan. The basic idea is that you'll take your passphrase and split it between n people your trust with ssss. You need to decide (as part of your plan), who's going to help.
As an example, one share is given to your partner, one share for your lawyer, one share for your child, one share for your parents, one share in a safety deposit box and so forth. You get to choose the threshold required for reconstruction of your message.
I'd suggest as an experiment:
Create a file with secrets (passwords, SSI number, etc).
Randomly generate a long password.
Encrypt it with GPG (use 256 bit AES, not the default of CAST5).
Take the randomly generated password and split that secret between many people.
Feel free to modify and update that file with information as time passes. If you do that, keep the password the same or re-do the password generation, splitting and distribution steps.
Ensure you do a test run before you actually deploy a plan like this. Spend time to inform all the people involved with your goals, clearly state what you're trying to accomplish, how and why you're trusting them.
Assuming that your password is very strong and that you use proper crypto for the file itself, you're probably in good shape unless AES256 is broken. If that happens, it's clearly a game changer as I assume your gpg messages and encrypted disk content is protected with AES.
If you'd like more help to design such a plan, I'm game to help further. It seems like a fun challenge that would be useful to have vetted by many clueful people and then published for the general public.
Good luck!
#13 wins the comments thread.
Piece of paper in the safe deposit box. No, seriously. If you die, then your wife will have immediate access to it. If you both go, then the contents of the box are part of the estate, and the executor will have access. Best part is pencil and paper don't require special hard/software to access, and if there are changes (and there most certainly will be), then all you have to do is pop over to the bank and make the change. I mean, really, is there a need to get all high tech?
Docubank or some similar service
Letter to spouse, in sealed envelope in safe inside house. My assumption is that a breach to my safe deposit box is undetectable (by me), but breaching my safe requires higher motivation and is something I would discover and go into damage control. Not that there's anything on my systems that would interest anybody... but if everyone encrypts everything, life is better all around.
@#20 - valid point about breaching the safe deposit box, but if someone does, they probably aren't looking for passcodes, and they'd have to know what they go to.
I'm surprised no one suggested biometrics -- then your next of kin can remove your body parts and retrieve the data.
I agree with the other posters' recommendations of secure secret sharing. Not only is a single individual prevented from recovering your secret on their own, but the probability of too many semi-trusted parties losing their part of the shared secret can be made arbitrarily low. ssss looks like a suitable package, but I can't verify its security or correctness.
A question you might ask yourself is why you are encrypting your data in the first place. If you're only doing it to protect it against accidental disclosure via theft of your computers, then you might as well just carve the passphrase into a heavy rock on your property since very few thieves are going to care about your data enough to come back looking for a passphrase. If you're worried about governments or private investigators snooping in your files, too bad; they presumably have van eck phreaking equipment that puts your cryptography to shame. I believe I've seen papers for remote monitoring of keyboards, monitors, and lcds using everything from RF to sound waves. If you're worried about the border or airport police snooping, then you just need to not carry your passphrase with you in any written form, or even better don't even bother carrying encrypted or important data with you. Store it online in encrypted format, download it when you need it, and delete it when you're done. No mess, no fuss.
You probably shouldn't give away the passphrase to your gpg signing keys anyway, since it allows impersonation. Encrypt your data to a different key not used for public signatures, or at least instruct your executor to revoke your gpg keys once you die (you did create a revocation certificate, right?).
#7 beat me to mentioning the idea of secret splitting. Lets say your password is 128 bits. You could generate 128 bits of random data, and XOR the password with the random data (aka one-time pad). Give the XORed result to the person you want to have the password when you die (your wife, kid, etc.). Then split the random data into 10 pieces, and give them to 10 different people. Make sure that the 10 people don't know who else has a piece of the one-time pad, and tell them to give it to the person with the XORed password if you die. If you do it that way, the person with your password cannot be subpoenaed, because no one will really has the unencrypted password unless you are dead. Also, since the people with the pieces of the one-time pad don't know each other, then they cannot conspire to discover your password (and they would lack the XORed password). In case one of these people die, you can give copies of each piece to multiple people for redundancy.
Also, a one-time pad has advantages over 256 bit AES, as it is possible (even if unlikely) that in the future ether we can cover another planet with super-computers to crack your password, or a flaw in AES might be found. However, the only real chance of having your one-time pad cracked is if some time in the future someone discovers that all of the worlds mathematicians over the centuries were really quite stupid, and then goes on to discover a whole new form of mathematics. Unless this happens, the only way for an attacker to gain your password is to do a lot of work to try to find out who those 10 people are, then coerce each one into giving them each piece of the one-time pad.
I just write all my passwords on a sticky and slap it on the side of my monitor.
There was a piece related to this on NPR on May 11, 2009:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=104024294
They mention "Legacy Locker" -- a service I wish I'd created. There must be others?
Publish them all in plain sight, but encrypted with a unique key known only to you and those who survive you: the date and hour of your death. As long as you're still alive nobody will know how to decrypt it!
Now just arrange to die on that timestamp. Also make sure to do so in such a way that your body will be found right away. If you disappear down the Amazon, your stuff could remain encrypted forever.
Flash drives die without warning, CDs turn out to be unreadable after a few years, even Harddisks fail frequently... I'd go for the envelope-in-fireproof-safe-thing.
I think it would depend entirely on what was encrypted, and why.
I imagine that most things that are worth hiding from everyone (spouse, relatives, even your attorney) while you are alive are probably still worth hiding even after you are dead. I can't imagine too many things in this category myself (photos of you murdering someone? evidence of an affair? your diary? your porn collection?) If you want to hide it from your closest friends now, why would you want to share it after your death?
Another category would be things like Swiss bank account numbers, secret pirate treasure maps ... things you really want hidden now, but do want to bequeath to your family as a kind of surprise going-away present. In that case, store the encrypted data at home, but give the key to your attorney (without explaining exactly what it decrypts) and verbal instructions to your wife. Or do a shared key arrangement like others have pointed out.
A final category is things that you don't really need to hide from your family at all, but you encrypt just because it's a good idea to encrypt things (in case your home is broken into and your computer stolen). This would include most of your documents, accounting software files, emails, etc, etc. For this category, just tell your trusted family members the password.
Maybe my imagination is dull today, but I can't fathom any type of encryption-worthy information that doesn't fall into one of these three categories.
Also, @#24: a one-time pad has an extreme disadvantage in that you have to store the pad somewhere. If you use your data on a semi-regular basis, I guarantee your pad will end up on a disk right next to the encrypted data. Other systems have the advantage of only requiring you to remember a password, not lug around a disk with you.
I figure that by the time I die there will be quantum computers which will be able to brute force a 128bit AES key though.
@#28 The one-time pad is only used to protect the password. Given the fact that the password is in Cory's head, he will never have to use it as he already knows the password. The only use for the one-time pad is for when he dies and needs to pass on the password. Therefore, the pad will only exist in the form of 10 (substitute with X if you want to split it differently) pieces given to trusted friends who do not know who else has it. It would never be on his hard disk, and he could in fact encrypt each piece to the person's public key (assuming they use GPG).
"it's just crazy to have a family and be intestate"
How can you be intestate when you have living next of kin? This implies you have no legal partner, your kids are either not yours, or you have no living parents or siblings! I think he means that he wants to apportion some or all of his estate in another other way (eg to a mistress, dogs home, EFF etc.)
As to the keys issue - the answer is they die with you. Leave your executors to access stuff that needs to be accessed by following the proper (and legal!) procedures after your death. That is what executors are for. It would be completely improper for somebody who is not an executor to have power over your estate!
Make a riddle of the password, write it on a piece of parchment and put it in a cryptex. The put the cryptex in a secret swiss bank vault. Make the numeric password for the vault account something that only the person to open it would be able to figure out, like a famous numeric serie. Then hide the key in plain sight from the same person and train this person in code breaking. It helps if you select a young person as trustee. Also make many more riddles and place them over a large area in several citys also mainly hidden in plain sight. This give you deniability. If you have time, start a secret cult to protect all this.
@#29: Ah, I see what you are saying. You keep a copy of your password XORed with a one-time pad on your hard drive, and distribute parts of the pad to different people.
That would certainly keep the AES password secure, but 10 people all having different parts of the OTP key seems like there would be lots of chance for failure. One might die in a plane crash while flying with family members, then the data wouldn't be recoverable. (Well, I guess if the key parts were small enough you could brute force the key parts you don't have if you have most of them.)
You might as well give the whole OTP key to your attorney, but as long as you are doing that you might as well just give the AES password to your attorney and cut out this secondary step--I don't see the immediate advantage of encrypting the key to an encryption.
How can you be intestate when you have living next of kin?
Intestate means not having a Will.
Dead-mans switch. Set up a server to mail them (encrypted of course with a key only she knows) to your wife if you haven't logged into a server for a certain amount of time.
@#33 Actually, I see no reason to store the one-time pad on the hard drive. It's only purpose is to encrypt the password, which Cory already knows. The only time the pad is needed is if he is dead. Therefore, why have it on his hard drive? Just give a copy of each piece to the designated people.
You do bring up a good point about the possibility of one of those people dying. That is why I recommend giving each part to several people, and as an added precaution make sure they are geographically dispersed. There is still the chance that all the recipients of a given piece of the pad will meet an untimely end, but the statistical likelihood is very, very small.
Just store them in Google Base. No one will ever look there.
What is the average lifespan of a flash drive? How long before one or more bits in an arbitrary key gets flipped?
Or you could just encode the digital data via a PCM style stripe (or two, three, etc) on a piece of paper. Put that in your fire proof safe and your encoded key will probably be around and readable longer than the disks that the data is stored on.
Seriously, some version of the 'put the data (private passkey) here, put the info needed to decrypt it there' seems perfectly reasonable. The details simply help define how paranoid you are (were).
ioerror @16, I came here to say roughly the same thing.
The Wiki page has links to the various implementations of SSS. The Windows' implementation, 'Secret Sharp', will even generate passwords for you. I'm sure the the Linux version does, as well.
Here's a possible scheme:
1) Encrypt your secret: GPG keys and passwords, bank account numbers, etc, as one large text file, using some cryptographically strong password. There are lots of sources and schemes of strong passwords out there. For example, you could use: 1234567890.
2) Run the password through SSS, splitting it into a '3 out of 5 shares':
3/5 Shares generated from the password from Step 1):
000PdzdyrKeR+AMkOGN
001leNXIuyI8MP3Y6Mk
002zUlybHj+nqwcCjw4
003ZXb4hCboKY/n+X6R
004X11o/f9pKVCwVDrY
Any three of the five share above are sufficient to restore the password.
3) Distribute the shares among: Wife, Lawyer, two good friends unrelated to Wife and Lawyer, and keep the fifth one for Step 4).
4) Run the fifth share (004X11o/f9pKVCwVDrY) through SSS again, generating a '2 out of 4 shares', giving:
0006Kd9EmZtz/7E5dkiF9et+yobE5U=
001oLW0XsaWY87YAlZWXo2n8J25UmE=
002eILviiealxP9KsfKhWO57UVfkPA=
003MJAmxodhOyPhzUi+zDmz5vL90QQ=
and distribute them among Mark, David, Xeni, and John, here.
Now:
In order to decrypt the secret, three shares from step 2 are required.
Your wife and lawyer can't supply enough of them to decrypt the secret. They'd need to convince either one of your 'good friends' or two out of four BB moderators to give up their shares.
Or, your wife and lawyer aren't, um, available.
Because, after you spotted them canoodling on a beach in Folkestone, near Dover, you drove your Escort Mark VI van (I forgot to mention: you fell on hard times in late 2011 and had to eke out a grubby living, delivering washing machine parts in the Southeast of England. But I digress.) off the cliff and onto the beach towel they were sharing on that warm early-July afternoon, killing them and yourself.
Then, your two friends would just have to convince two out of four BB moderators, and thus gain access to your 'strong' password from step 1), and be able to unlock your secret file.
srsly, time for MC Frontalot:
Get your most closely kept personal thought:
put it in the Word .doc with a password lock.
Stock it deep in the .rar with extraction precluded
by the ludicrous length and the strength of a reputedly
dictionary-attack-proof string of characters
(this, imperative to thwart all the disparagers
of privacy: the NSA and Homeland S).
You better PGP the .rar because so far they ain’t impressed.
You better take the .pgp and print the hex of it out,
scan that into a TIFF. Then, if you seek redoubt
for your data, scramble up the order of the pixels
with a one-time pad that describes the fun time had by the thick-soled-
boot-wearing stomper who danced to produce random
claptrap, all the intervals in between which, set in tandem
with the stomps themselves, begat a seed of math unguessable.
Ain’t no complaint about this cipher that’s redressable!
Best of all, your secret: nothing extant could extract it.
By 2025 a children’s Speak & Spell could crack it.
You can’t hide secrets from the future with math.
You can try, but I bet that in the future they laugh
at the half-assed schemes and algorithms amassed
to enforce cryptographs in the past.
And future people do not give a damn about your shopping,
your Visa number SSL’d to Cherry-Popping
Hot Grampa Action websites that you visit,
nor password-protected partitions, no matter how illicit.
And this, it would seem, is your saving grace:
the amazing haste of people to forget your name, your face,
your litanous* list of indefensible indiscretions.
In fact, the only way that you could pray to make impression
on the era ahead is if, instead of being notable,
you make the data describing you undecodable
for script kiddies sifting in that relic called the internet
(seeking latches on treasure chests that they could wreck in seconds but didn’t yet
get a chance to cue up for disassembly)
to discover and crack the cover like a crème brûlée.
They’ll glance you over, I guess, and then for a bare moment
you’ll persist to exist; almost seems like you’re there, don’t it?
But you’re not. You’re here. Your name will fade as Front’s will,
‘less in the future they don’t know our cryptovariables still.
Now it’s an Enigma machine, a code yelled out at top volume
through a tin can with a thin string, and that ain’t all you
do to broadcast cleartext of your intentions.
Send an email to the government pledging your abstention
from vote fraud this time (next time: can’t promise).
See you don’t get a visit from the department of piranhas.
Be honest; you ain’t hacking those. It’d be too easy,
setting up the next president, pretending that you were through freezing
when you’re nothing but warming up: ‘to do’ list in your diary
(better keep for a long time — and the long time better be tiring
to the distribution of electrical brains
that are guessing every unsalted hash that ever came).
They got alien technology to make the rainbow tables with,
then in an afternoon of glancing at ‘em, secrets don’t resist
the loving coax of the mathematical calculation,
heart of your mystery sent free-fall into palpitations.
Computron will rise up in the dawn, a free agent.
Nobody knows the future now; gonna find out — be patient.
In my opinion, the KISS principle applies. I agree with those above who said: write them down, put them in a sealed envelope, and then in a safe or safe deposit box. Anything you don't want your loved ones to ever access, just don't right those keys down (and make sure they're different than anything you HAVE written down).
Simple and effective.
Or, are you thinking of future biographers needing access to everything?
Teach the passwords to your spouse. She can't be subpoenaed for the info, and even if someone tries, a shrug and "He never told me" is very believable.
ssss is a great find- I had been using multikey, but its creator appears to have abandoned it. It was almost exactly the same, except doing more than 128 bytes, so I'm glad to see there's an option that is less "cryptic" to compile/install for the people who I'm giving this mess to. The strength needs to lie in the key, not the algorithm, or it won't work for its intended audience.
(multikey can still be found in the web archive, http://web.archive.org/web/20040604195612/www.erikyyy.de/multikey/ but could the people using my keys do it?)
A Dead Man's Switch seems like the best (and most annoying) solution to me.
The other option could be to, I don't know, trust the person you've decided to spend your life with and give them the passwords while you are alive.
I wondered the same thing, but after reading the comments here I thing writing the passwords down and putting them in a safe place sounds like the most reasonable plan. Though, I worry if authorities could get access (activist/news writer/Chaos Computer Club member paranoia, I'm not a mass murderer or sth). Cause that would really suck. I fear they might manage.
Get real. Your wife already knows your passphrase. Hell, we already know your passphrase. It's "b0ingb0ing123"
What you want is an encrypted time release lockout. Configure your excrypted partitions such that a properly formatted request starts a countdown (7 days maybe, or even 14, 30 etc) after which time the drive decrypts.
With a nice long request string you can then break it up into chunks and distribute these to friends/family/lawyer/deathswitch.com etc.
This system ensures no single point of failure on the part of the keyholders and even if all of them are suborned/subpoenaed/hacked the enforced wait period makes it substantially more difficult to break this system while you are alive and gives time for legal challenges and injunctions should someone attempt to gain access when you are deceased.
You could even go one step further and institute an additional layer of fragmented keys and time-release by having a specific location serve as the initial gateway. Access to that location is controlled as above and once the wait period is over it releases the final segments of the keys to unlock your main data repositories.
Setup automatic tweet/email/sms notification that the gateway program has been triggered and is counting down or has registered a failed access attempt and it becomes immediately obvious if someone attempts unauthorised access. You then have only to change the distributed key fragments for the gateway rather than re-memorise a whole new set of working keys.
I put them in an encrypted text file using LockNote. Probably whatever I leave behind will end up in the hands of the government.
Secret splitting is the technology of choice here. Create a specific password or passphrase (or even the key) for "In Case of Emergency". However, I would suggest deploying it a bit differently than most are suggesting.
First off, though - I figure that the whole point of friends is people whose judgment you trust. So, yes, I will explain the process to them. And I will suggest scenarios where they might need to recombine. But I won't lock in those scenarios. That's what judgment is for. Mainly, I will tell them that they need to be prepared to announce that they have a split publicly in the event of what they consider to be a good reason.
Moreover, just in case, I would choose a few geographically dispersed friends. You'll see why in a moment.
The other key factor is that I will probably use a split like (10,20). That's right - any 10 people out of the 20 I choose will be able to reveal the key. But - I will NOT tell each person who the other 19 are.
In the event of a "good reason" - death, missing, major accident, even your whole family suffering an accident - it is likely that this will become publicly known, and it is certain that this knowledge will be well known among your friends. At that point, the split holders can publicly identify themselves - something they would not normally do. Ten of the twenty can swap the keys (remember, you trust these people to some extent) and arrange for the release of the master secret. Because they aren't locked in to only preordained reasons, they can release the info as they see fit.
What they can NOT easily do is try and collude to gain the secret ahead of time. Although they might know who lots of your friends are, they don't know which ones have splits. Moreover, even attempting to find this out on the sly makes them likely to run across someone who will report it back to you. If they try and do it publicly, someone will call them on it, and then call you.
Geographic dispersion also makes it more likely that ten of the twenty will be available, while simultaneously making it harder for them to collude.
This is secure, but it is also robust in the face of an uncertain future. It inserts human judgment into a key point in a strong crypto process, aiming the get the best of both.
Finally - I would put several splits into the safety deposit box (might even want to do (10,25) and put 5 in the box). In the event the box can be opened (already likely a critical scenario) it then dramatically reduces the number of split holders who need to contribute their factors. It does not, however, immediately compromise your info to anyone who has access to the box.
Have them tattooed in a circle around your asshole.
Tell everyone you have your passphrases tattooed around your asshole. No one will believe you. But after you die, and no one can find them, someone will say, "Hey, remember when Cory said he had them tattooed around his asshole?"
And some brave soul will do the right thing.
@51:Have them tattooed in a circle around your asshole.
This will not be secure.
Britain has CCTV cameras EVERYWHERE!
The thing about being alive is you (still) have some reasonable expectation to privacy. That is, if you keep a filing cabinet, it won't be autopsied until you are also. So it's safe to sneak, cleverly, a bit of paper with your keys on it. Anyone determined to page, literally, through reams is probably going to get your keys by hook or by crook. There are places that aren't disturbed when you're alive that might be looked through when you're dead. Of course, someone could get lucky. Probably a child. Quandary, isn't it?
Commenter #1 could be on to a great, simple idea. He says "But I'm just an illustrator..." Hire an illustrator to hide them in an illustration, ala Jaffe fold-in style. Then just put half the illustration (with half of each key)up on on your wall and the other half goes in your safe deposit box.
When the two sides are combined after you are gone your cryptokeys can be read again.
- j.b. from Canada
@Alan: that does seem like a good (and easy) solution. I think I'll go for a bank-deposit-box when I get as far as writing my will etc.
My brother died three years ago, without a will.
All the issues that mattered where documented in paper (bank accounts, property, insurances, etc.), so we just proceeded to go to each company, document the situation and follow up the different procedures each company had for this situation (in many cases banks request that you name beneficiaries for situations precisely like this).
We didn't need a password or key of any kind at all, in spite of him being computer literate (he made a living fixing computers and doing a bit of programming) which meant he managed all his affairs online.
I myself don't see the need for anybody to have any of my keys or passwords.
So, what is exactly the problem?
When you die your children will format your hard drive and sell it on eBay. Don't worry about it.
https://www.dialawg.com
You can store secure documents and messages and optionally share with your attorney, spouse, etc. I use it to keep a list of all my passwords and general secure information about me on the web (bank account access, social security number, etc.).
Nerds - always finding the most complex solution to a problem.
Pen, paper. Done. Anything more is insane paranoid wankery.
I like the "requires X of Y" sss solutions, on the basis that they remove one required form of trust: you only need to trust people not to disclose your secret; there's less worry about whether they LOSE it.
To me, the most important thing about my "List of keys" is that when I'm gone, it's a list of places I have access to. In each case, one of two things will be true:
1) Someone needs to remove my access from that place (principle of least access: dead people need access to at most one vault).
2) Someone needs to use that access to provide support to the services that are accessed.
For these, my wife has access to the USB sticks; my older friends can probably guess the password, given enough time. I should probably make better arrangements, though.
nasalgoat @ 58: "Pen, paper. Done. Anything more is insane paranoid wankery."
Hmm, what if the house burns down?
First, DO NOT leave vital will documents in your safe deposit box if yours is the only name on the box account. Many well-meaning folks have one that, only to cause their families months of cos and grief because if the will naming the heirs to the box's contents is IN the safe deposit box,and the safe deposit box can only be opened by the heirs...as named in that will..it takes a court order to access the damn box. Make sure your spouse and one trusted agent both have names on the box. Or talk to your attorney about leaving access to him via a letter. Just in case you and your spouse both die together.
Print out your information, or place it on a thumb drive and make a 2-part code to access the thumb drive. Leave one half on a drive in a sealed envelope and give the other half of the code to your spouse sealed in with a letter explaining what it's for. Put it in a waterproof envelope in the back of the top shelf of the fridge. It's safe, waterproof, fireproof, and even if buglers find it, it's only 1/2 of a code.
I'm also leaving a thumb drive with my email/facebook accounts passwords with my best friend so in case of my death she can go in and delete my emails and close those things down, and asking her to go through my clothes, etc. and get them donated (and clear out any intimate items I don't want my parents or kids seeing).
Basically making sure that my partner won't be left to deal with everything on his own if I die before he does. Life insurance and estate planning are vital- but making sure that your partner won't be overwhelmed by the smaller issues helps too.
Encrypt a file containing personal key against your attorney's key.
Encrypt that file against a group of trusted individuals' keys.
Then encrypt against a third key in a sealed envelope in a safe deposit box (use a wax seal with a picture on record with your attorney and trusteds if you're really paranoid).
Results:
Breaking the seal on the envelope provides tamper notification.
Death makes the safe deposit box available to spouse/executor.
Decryption requires access to the safe deposit box, and the cooperation of the attorney and at least one other trusted individual.
None of this requires special technologies, or layered untrusted applications.
I echo the comment cautioning against using a safe deposit box. Anything your survivors need to access before the end of the probate process, e.g. your will, should NOT go in a safe deposit box. My loved ones know that my will is in the freezer, where it'll likely survive a house fire just fine.
As to the encrypted stuff, well, most of it is encrypted precisely so my family DOESN'T find it after I'm dead. And I'm not cruel enough to ask my widow to go through my email inbox; after I'm dead she has to get on with HER life, not with mine.
So, this may be silly, but here we go.
If you want your next of kin to be able to access your private encrypted files after your death, include them in a sealed envelope with the will, to be presented at the reading.
Use a lawyer you trust not to steal them.
Yes, the government can probably get them by a long drawn out process of filling paper work to force him to give them the codes.
But is that REALLY a concern? Unless you're doing something that is illegal, do you really have cause for concern that the government will BOTHER to go to the trouble to get your keys so they can sift your private files?
Would the government of the USA, or the UK, or Canada really waste the time and man power to investigate the private files of someone if they didn't already have some decent proof that the person in question had done illegal things?
I doubt it.
And, if you are doing illegal things, do you really want to leave the keys to the proof of that to your next of kin anyway?
If your private files contained proof that you were laundering money, or trafficking in narcotics, or supporting a terrorist organization, do you really want to leave that information to your wife and children when you die?
Probably not.
So, I'm gonna say that any personal information you want to keep private until after your death, and then leave they encryption keys to others, you can probably safely trust those keys to your estate lawyer.
I wouldn't rely on attorney-client privilege because it does not cover crypto keys. Privilege applies only to communications between you and your attorney. It doesn't cover the actual facts communicated or any items deposited.
Check out deadmansswitch.net
John
Don't use deadmansswitch.net for your actual keys. Keep your critical data in an encrypted doc. Give the doc to your trusted family/friends. Then have deadmansswitch.net mail out the key to unlock the doc in case of emergency.
The docs have no value without the key. The key has no value to anyone that doesn't have a copy of your encrypted doc.
John
#13 "Have me reduced to hashes, then encrypted in a .jar"
No obfuscation before hashing?
To my way of thinking, there are two classes of secrets: The secrets I can trust my spouse to have now (because I trust her in a practical sense to not divulge my secrets even under threat of law) - thus, she knows the passphrases to my encryption keys; Second, those secrets that I cannot trust my spouse with, because providing her those secrets violates some manner of contract or endangers her health, safety, or well-being. Those secrets I have scrupulously limited entirely to the secrets of clients and employers, and all of those are secrets which I hold in perpetuum and which could not benefit her by knowing.
As far as the law is concerned in Texas, my wife and I are a single legal entity (but IANAL, IANYL, ATINLA). I know she won't divulge the passphrases.
If I were to have some manner of secret that needed to be communicated, but not to my wife while I was alive, and which was therefore of a third class - I would need a copy of Ubuntu on CD, a thumb drive with PGP/SSSS implementations, a fairly-old personal computer, and a faraday cage. And a printer. And a fire into which the computer and thumb drive would be dumped immediately afterwards. Maybe the printer, too. Very few people know precisely what kind of memory is onboard most devices these days and what manner of information they may be storing in NVRAM or battery/cap-backed RAM for later transmission once connected to a network.
Why has Death Switch got a picture of what appears to be The Human League in the bottom right of their home page?
if you've ever typed any of your keys into a computer then "they" can get them... so who are you hiding them from???
Keep a notebook... after all, there is lots of little things for your computer that you need to write down anyway... so keep the note book next to your computer and who ever wants to take the time to dig through it can have your keys...
the government already has them...
I keep my passwords in a email account that only a few people have the password to, this is kept secret by not revealing that this is so so if I happen to die because of some horrible accident when my friends look through my stuff they wood also check my email.
This reminds me of the story of the disputed Yahoo account.
http://news.cnet.com/Yahoo-releases-e-mail-of-deceased-Marine/2100-1038_3-5680025.html