What (if any) systems do people have in place to allow #emergency access to your #passwords and online accounts in the event of your death or incapacity?
I’m thinking of using Shamir’s Secret Sharing to distribute weighted shares of a key to various people (family, friends, #solicitor) to allow a variety of combinations to recover a password to a vault containing all the info about finances and online accounts.
(#EPA already in place between myself & Mrs @barsteward)
@barsteward I've been thinking about this a lot over the last 24hrs and I think it isn't going to be as easy as giving access to my online accounts.
Say that the proverbial bus comes along tomorrow. My wife's email account is a user account of a Google Workspace to which my account is the admin.
Everything will work, for a time, but she will need to make sure that the domain is renewed (dependency on my credit card and my admin accounts with Google and the registrar).
@barsteward If Google ever need the admin to take an action or close Workspace, then the entire email system for my wife could vaporise without her knowing what to do.
So maybe, for us geeks, it isn't enough just to give your partner and/or trustees the keys to the kingdom. Maybe we need to appoint a digital estate manager to handle the things that must stay running for the rest of the family once we are gone.
@barsteward I am not overly concerned if my websites shut down, or my flickr account stops working, or the countless other things that are not really that important.
But knowing that my wife's digital life might be impacted is actually quite a horrific thought.
@danieldurrans Exactly this; I’m the admin for various services used by family. Domain name recently renewed for 10 years, email service, online backup, passwords for on-prem servers / services. A list of how things are configured and how to access would be needed. Finances - I have various old pensions, some cryptocurrency, shares etc.
Not so worried about my Twitter account though.
@danieldurrans I moved away from Google Workspace recently after their debacle about free accounts, but it took a lot of time to replace; I wouldn’t trust Google services to just keep running without intervention.
@barsteward I was close to moving from Google, but when they issued their reprieve for personal use I stuck with them. I realise I'll need to move sometime, although I wasn't overly keen on the alternatives.
I am still stuck on the "who will help my wife figure all this out" part of the digital death problem. She won't be able to reconfigure things on her own, so who will be that trusted party. A lawyer can help you sort out probate but do I need to appoint a digital death engineer?
@danieldurrans@barsteward
I think that the pressing problem scenario is more immediate than 'in the event of death'.
I have 2FA apps on my phone. I do have recovery codes stored securely. But if I lose my phone, while away from home, I feel that I could be quite awkwardly locked out of things.
I don't have a satisfactory solution to this.
@tpuddle@barsteward my 2FA authentication is done by my password manager which syncs between my devices, so as long as I can get to another one of my devices I am good. I have a few yubikey that keeps the password manager secure.
@barsteward About eight years ago I considered setting up some form of dead man's escrow service, but then I looked at how much work it would be and stopped.
@tautology Hmmm, holding credentials for 3rd parties would certainly paint a large target on your back, for criminals and lawful requests for access. Also, the financial liability if sued when things go wrong massively outweighs the potential financial gain.
@barsteward It was a good few years back and I mostly sketched the details out mentally whilst walking the dog; but part of the plan required a password/key to be held in escrow by another party, released upon death.
As I get more middle aged and Facebook tends to memorial book, I do think there is a market for a product to handle this securely.
@tautology I think I can make a system that works for securely sharing credentials & information, even one which uses a dead-man’s handle to share info, but what’s missing is standardised support from online services to allow 3rd party authority posthumously, so use of those credentials would likely fall foul of the CMA.
@barsteward it is quite easy to find places where sensible things break the CMA; almost like a law written about computer systems 40 years ago is no longer appropriate.
@barsteward the system I/we use is a 1Password family account. Any of the admins (me + wife) can really noisily reset/recover the other’s account. I needed to do it recently, when I enabled 2FA via a hardware key, then broke the key.
The process was:
wife reset my account
all my devices got (loudly) signed out
I got an email to recover my account and followed the process
I kinda like that it’s workable, though not sure how it would work if we couldn’t get access to the other’s mail.
@markhughes That’s great for the personal messages but there are multiple failure modes for that, which include the person opening it early, or mislaying it.
@barsteward the only time I’ve given this any serious consideration is with respect to work-related accounts. I don’t think that says good things about my priorities 😬
In this case, it would include setting up physical 2FA devices and storing them safely on premises. In most cases 2FA makes the passwords themselves somewhat moot so I’d probably just print them out.
@barsteward I use 1Password with a FIDO key. I gave one of my adult children the printed recovery kit and one of the FIDO keys. I trust my kids. (I trust my wife, too, but she's my likely partner in an untimely demise.)
It would be more secure to give one child the recovery kit and another the FIDO key. You could even split the recovery kit into two parts and divide then among three people
@neil@barsteward Just a shared Keepass vault with the wife, synced between our laptops at random times. We could use a better system, but it's better than nothing.
@neil@barsteward Write your password manager password on a piece of paper. Put it in a safe deposit box. Make sure your family knows what bank it’s at. Established legal and organizational processes for transferring to next of kin
@neil@barsteward sure, it shouldn’t be your only copy. Lots of established process around if your payment e.g. fails to clear or the bank burns down. (Also the vaults are fire-rated and better than any residential safe.) Similarly the number of third parties who can compel disclosure is small and the process for doing so is well established & requires notification in almost all cases
@neil@barsteward There’s a physical key you keep. They have to drill the boxes if you lose yours. Pretty hard to bribe somebody to get around that. Again, not the banks’ first rodeo either
@kevinriggle@neil@barsteward yeah we're big fans of safety deposit boxes. it's unfortunately hard to find them these days, a lot of banks have decided they're not profitable. they are pretty well ideal for certain tasks, this being one of them.
@barsteward@kevinriggle@neil we're not hurting for money so it would be well worth it to us. the fancy math-oriented approach to this stuff is.... well, too likely to fail closed when it really matters.
@neil@irenes@barsteward This has been more or less the same over fifteen years and three different small local banks in MA and CA so I’d expect the same pretty much anywhere. Given that a bank has a vault, it gets them nonzero marginal additional customers like me and a much better chance of selling me a mortgage
@barsteward@irenes@neil my mom and sister are both pretty tech savvy and I still don’t want to make them have to apt-get install anything after the funeral
@neil@kevinriggle@irenes A Python script or JavaScript that could even be run in an online browser-based environment? Or a tech-savvy lawyer who charges to do this if it’s ever needed?
@kevinriggle@neil@irenes more than I’d spend, but there’s probably a business model in solicitors offering some kind of service like this alongside will writing and LPA setup.
@neil@barsteward@kevinriggle we have a friend who attempted to build a startup about ten years ago to do something along these lines. they did not succeed as a business. who knows, maybe someday there will be enough demand.
@neil@kevinriggle@barsteward Even if someone gets access to your safety deposit box it’s just a password on a piece of paper. There doesn’t have to be anything about what it is for or even who it belongs to. The chances of you having your password vault compromised if your safety deposit box is are remarkably small.
If law enforcement knew you had the safety deposit box with your password in it then they could get access that way but do boxes even have to be registered with real details?
@simon@neil@kevinriggle for me it’s an ongoing cost that I’d want to avoid; a modest one-off upfront cost would be OK, but an annual fee seems unnecessary.
Is is possible to leave a sealed envelope with a firm of solicitors? Along with some dramatic, “In the event of my death…” instructions? Or is that just in books and films too?
Sorry if I missed mention of this elsewhere: There is a version of Bitwarden server, Vaultwarden, that is easy to setup (if you use, say, Cloudron or Yunohost) as a self-hosted instance on a VPS or even on your own box. I've been running one for my wife and myself for some time with almost no hiccups or difficulties.
And Bitwarden does allow you to designate authorized takeover agents.
@neil@kevinriggle@barsteward
Maybe. My (possibly faulty) understanding is that plain old Bitwarden server, striving to be enterprise-usable, is bigger and more difficult to administer than my little family usage requires.
@neil Some services allow you to specify a contact to allow access to in the event of your death, some (e.g. banks) allow for nomination of a 3rd party to have access without the need for PoA (but that’s immediate).
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