I've been thinking about this on-and-off for a while now. I don't want to entrust my secrets with any single entity; I want a cryptographic solution. A couple

I've been thinking about this on-and-off for a while now. I don't want to entrust my secrets with any single entity; I want a cryptographic solution. A couple ideas I have considered: - Using a secret sharing protocol to split a key into N pieces for people you trust. This would be relatively simple, but there's the risk that they might be hard to get into contact with, or might have come into harm's way themselves. A threshold scheme can be used to allow N<M people to reconstruct the key. This is vulnerable to collusion. To prevent compromise of individuals in a targeted attack, the keys could be stored on smart cards. Also vulnerable to hardware failure. - Unparallelizable time lock / time release crypto. The problem is, this needs to be able to be decrypted in a reasonable amount of time after my death. But if that's the case, then any bad actor could decrypt it given enough time. One solution is to embed the private key and program in an HSM, and use enough rounds that it will take, say, one week for the HSM to brute force. I could reset it daily, and connect it to my UPS. Should I die, I wouldn't be there to reset it, and it would release the private key. The problem there is, should I ever get held up for any reason, it'd be released. The idea sounds cool, but I'm not sure it'd work very well. Also, what if the hardware becomes damaged after my death? Or a violent criminal breaks into my house and steals the HSM with everything else indiscriminately? Both schemes could also be used in parallel---the HSM key could be absolutely required in conjunction with everything else. If it is compromised, I generate new keys and redistribute them. This all requires more thought. The scheme needs to be very unlikely to fail. If I die, I want it to include private keys for my disk encryption, select account passwords, etc so that my wife can access the information she needs, or would find valuable. I would also likely sign (cryptographically with my PGP key) a document that states that I have indeed died, to send to others.