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I have an envelope in a fire safe in my house that says, "Open on Death". In it is a list of all my accounts and passwords. My computer password, my phone passw
by joshuaheard 5y ago
I have an envelope in a fire safe in my house that says, "Open on Death". In it is a list of all my accounts and passwords. My computer password, my phone password, everything. I use a password manager, so it's an easy thing to print the list of passwords. If I were to die, anyone could pick up that envelope and have the literal keys to my kingdom.
It also contains all my estate documents, like a will and other things. I have emailed my family and told them the location of the safe. The fire safe also contains original paper documents like deeds and birth certificates.
- throw123123123 5y agoI would not say this online, my man.
- dylan604 5y agoOr if your house was burgled, and someone took that envelope before you died, you'd be in a world of hurt. Especially now that anyone that reads HN knows your secret. The amount of details some people post online just boggles me.
- anonporridge 5y agoSeems like there should be a market for N of M key encrypted post-death documents. e.g. have a 3 of 5 key that can decrypt this document with all of your personal secrets. 1 key for yourself, 2 with loosely connected family members, and 2 with different attorneys that have legal obligations to only use the key on your verified death and as specified by your cleartext will. This kind of scheme would be highly resistant to failure, since if any one key gets lost, you can discard and regenerate the ciphertext with new keys, and possibly change the secret information (e.g. passwords) if you're worried about future compromise. It's also highly resistant to collusion since it would require a malicious family member or attorney to collude with at two other parties against your will in order to compromise your secrets, all while not knowing exactly of what value those secrets are.
- notreallyserio 5y agoFWIW fire safes only protect their contents for a short period of time (IIRC typically under a few hours). You may want to make a backup and store it in a bank vault or similar.
- giarc 5y ago>I use a password manager, so it's an easy thing to print the list of passwords. Why not just provide the password for your manager? Isn't that the whole point?
- joshuaheard 5y agoYes, but I change the master password often, so the printed list is a backup.
- ElectronShak 5y agoeh..this is too much info to reveal online...how bout say, a VPS (with your preferred cloud service provider), which if not logged into in say 40 days, sends an SMS or Email to your Wife or Next of Kin with your secrets, pins, passwords and locations to anything physical.
- nsajko 5y ago> VPS (with your preferred cloud service provider), which if not logged into in say 40 days, sends an SMS or Email to your Wife or Next of Kin with your secrets, pins, passwords and locations to anything physical. Perhaps even better: only have a cryptographic key on the cloud, the data is duplicated and stored encrypted with family?
- tofuahdude 5y agoYou're saying this online with an username that appears to be your real name; this is a real risky way to handle your entire financial / technical set-up.
- joshuaheard 5y agoI guess I didn't think this through. Looks like I need to upgrade my situation.
- joshuaheard 5y agoUpdate: Since I unwittingly exposed myself on HN, I have updated my security arrangement. I have destroyed the paper list of passwords, which are now only stored in an encrypted password manager. Pieces of information to enable access to the password manager have been divided up among family members.