Dead Man's Switch

This same website gets posted once in a while and it drives me crazy.

Do not use this service. With less than 60 seconds of looking, you can hijack people's deadmanswitch accounts with a simple CSRF on the email change API.

If you have a "high value secret" and you are a normal person, lawyers work pretty well. If you have a "high value secret" and you're Ed Snow, something like this site is not a solution you should use because it will get you killed. Nobody has a use for this...

It's worth noting that both Google and Facebook provide ways of handling your account after you die:

Google Inactive Account Manager: https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/3036546

Facebook Legacy Contact / Memorialization: https://www.facebook.com/help/1568013990080948

Yikes, given the sorts of uses this would be put to, it seems like the definition of a "high-value target".

I would be terrified of running a site like this unless I had a lot of experience with resisting DoS and state-sponsored attackers.

Interesting project! I had a similar idea- "My Social Death". When you died, it would post to your Facebook, Twitter, etc. Thought of it when a few friends died and I saw many others changing their profile pictures and continuing to bring up how close they were. People grieve in their own way but it rubbed me the wrong way and I started thinking of how you could control the message when you died. I would love to post a "I had a good life, don't be sad for me" type of message. But verifying death is certainly tricky...

My verification idea was the self emails, but also a few friends would have to verify (or they could initiate). That way if you lost access to your email, you could avoid a false positive.

At first I thought this was Dead Man's Snitch[1], a service based on the same concept but used to alert you when cron jobs fail to execute. A pretty valuable part of my toolbox on every project.

1. https://deadmanssnitch.com

I have at least one datapoint to suggest that people are looking for this kind of thing.

I run a service, Cronitor, essentially a dead man's switch for jobs, heartbeats, etc. Doing some analysis on notification method preferences (Email is top, followed by Slack) I noticed a webhook that will hit a url that ended with send_secrets.php if the creator doesn't ping at least once every day.

No alerts had yet been sent so the secrets seem to be safe. I added a todo for a couple more test cases around alert sending -- I'd hate to ship a bug that accidentally sends whatever the heck is in that file. I would suspect the creators of this service will feel that same pressure soon.

To EVERYONE screaming at how insecure this service is: PGP. I've ensured key members of my family have PGP keys via keybase.io, and stored only a signed and encrypted message on the servers.

I've used this site for years now and I can firsthand tell you how awesome it is. I once accidentally triggered my death when I dropped out of contact for a few months, but otherwise, it's amazing to know that even if I die, I can from beyond the grave, I can set in motion an elaborate chain of events that will end up with my family possessing all my digital assets (including about half a bitcoin), people whose digital assets I manage will receive full control back, and MOST importantly: my best friend will delete the porn on my computer in time, and only then surrender my passphrase to my family.

This would be a brilliant long game phishing attack. You have regular emails with links arriving that people think they have to click or bad things will happen. Not saying at all that's what this is, just that the thought popped into my mind.

Great idea!

I'd like to see an answer to "How will you ensure the continued operation of this service over N years?" on the help page though.

I'm a bit worried by the reliance on email to validate aliveness. If something were to ...happen... (ominous music playing in the background) it's possible that such an entity could gain access to my inbox, allowing them to sidestep the DMS entirely, perhaps even gain access to its contents?

Ideally this would require two or three separate methods to verify you're still alive. Or some form of challenge/response relying on at least two different mediums/communication networks/devices.

This is a really great idea, with a really poor execution.

I'm just a regular guy, but the messages and details that I would leave in a service like this are too sensitive to be put on someone else's server for a period of years. (Maybe I'm just too private in this age of social networks).

We really need a PGP like solution for the masses. On that note, I wonder why someone like Mozilla doesn't take this on and push for human friendly client certificate authentication.

I like this idea. How do you ensure that you'll be around longer than I will?

I've been thinking about something like this for a long time, but I've never come to a solution where I'm fully comfortable with the technology to fully trust it.

There's too many "What if?"s. The biggest one being: What if their system glitches and mistakenly sends out emails even though I've been checking in?

What if I lose access to my email account? What if I end up in jail (regardless of reason) and can't hit the switch? What if they get a subpoena for the information contained within the emails? What if the service goes down? I'm under 30 - it's unlikely anything like this will be around for 50+ years.

To have a fully safe and secure Dead Man's Switch you would need more than just one layer of confirmation, and more than one layer of failsafes.

My thought so far is:

A service such as this one, except instead of an email with your secrets, it would simply release private key to certain key individuals. In said email would be only the key, and nothing else. This would have to be somewhat tech-savvy individuals that would know the significance of the key upon getting it. The email should come from my own personal address.

In my will I would entrust a different set of individuals (immediate family, etc) to one or more lockboxes contained an encrypted drive (HDD, SSD, flash drive.. something resilient.. maybe even the entire device.. maybe all of the above to protect against obsolescence.. ). The recipients of the first email would have to get in contact with these folks and mutually agree to decrypt the data on the drives.

If the emails are sent by mistake, then all I have to do is seek out my lockboxes and encrypt with a new key. The people who got the key will probably be asking "wtf is this?" about. Had I been dead, them seeing an email from my personal address with a private key would elicit a much different response.

Unfortunately this plan still relies on some technology to continuously log that I hit a button, which I don't like. I could misplace emails, I could lose access to my domain, if I do it via SMS, I could close my cell phone number... list goes on.

The only thing I can think of that doesn't involve another piece of technology is trusting the private key to a person (or organization) who is impartial and bound to secrecy to only divulge the key upon a copy of your death certificate. Lawyer perhaps?

Come to think of it, this could be a really cool add-on service to a life insurance policy. Instead of just cash, your beneficiaries get cash + vaulted information.

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.

Doesn't google already offer a very similar service built straight into gmail ?

I was building a similar product at deadmansswit.ch for a while, but gave up. I always thought the privacy-leaning Swiss aspect of the URL was fun, and I planned to have it run out of a DC in Switzerland.

I had more than email as the check-in transport, and the trigger would have delivered more than just email (upload files and videos to online services, post to Twitter, etc).

Anyway, the domain is free again if anyone wants it.

Edit: spoke too soon, it appears to have been taken by someone else.

> Premium Price: $20/lifetime

That's so discriminatory to cats with their nine lives! :D

Seriously, that's a great site, and I love the one-time fee model.

A great idea. When my girlfriend got sick and immunent death was a realistic possibility, she wrote down all her usernames and passwords on a piece of paper, which I then put in a drawer in my home office, only to look at when the worst happened.

It struck me at the time as being insecure but the low tech solution worked.

Perhaps this site would have been a better solution.

I had a similar idea to do this.

Is there any guarantee that if "bad things happen" to the author(s) of this project, the emails will live on and will be sent?

What about using Ethereum and the likes for these services?

A really valuable service to offer, with a great simple pricing model.

I've been using this service since shortly after I had an autoimmune attack that ate away a chunk of my nervous system about 8 years ago where I nearly died(technically, did kill me at one point for over a minute before they revived me). I went from being pretty much like you blokes, lost in the details of living without seriously thinking about dying...But i mean, who doesn't in their late 30s. It's easy to get tied up in your day to day concerns until those days start becoming distressingly short. Thankfully, I survived that, and the five years of rehabilitation it's taken to get me back to some shade approximating "normal", though i'm still very functionally and impaired and will never again be what I was...But such is life. Life is 10% what happens to you, 10% the available choices of your circumstances, and 80% how you CHOOSE to feel about it. All that being said, it's important to remember, the only people who know how and where they're going to die are suicides and people on death's row. The rest of us don't. Having lost many dear freinds and family over the years, I can tell you all unequivocally you should consider what you'd want to say to your friends, your family, even your most cherished rivals....Because statistically, at least one in one in three of every one reading this will die unexpectedly(heart disease, car wreck, lingering crotch rot from a unsanitary toilet seat, et al). Another third of you will get a terminal diagnosis only a few months before you expire because you put off "having that thing looked at like you've been meaning to" until it was too late.

I want that to sink in to all of you. Two of three of you wont have time for carefully crafting what you want to say, or to whom...Because you'll either BE dead, or WILL be shortly. And what i'll bet most of you want to say isn't about where you buried the treasure chest of Al Capone, or that you're the secret love child of Ronald Regan and Janet Jackson...It's that you love them, that you treasure this and that shared memory with them, and that you wish for them to remember you a particular way, or perform a certain ritual in your memory and honor, should they choose. Sure, this database wouldn't be hard to hack. What's in there is almost completely useless to anyone other than their loved ones. can you imagine how depressing it would be to read a hundred thousand dead people's communiques to snag the one juicy bit about some senator being the illegitimate son of Prince and Madonna? Yikes! All that being said, I've spent quite some time thinking on this subject, and the answer I keep coming back to on the "Verifying you're dead" problem I think should be handled by examination of the customers data footprint in some sort of routine way. If any of you have ever done data analytics or doxying, you'll know that there are some distinct signs that start to appear when your subject focus has died or dropped deeply off the grid, even after a few days. It seems to me that such qualities could be mathematically modeled into a set of software scripts, and that tied to the trigger. With a failsafe of primary and secondary inquiry designated by the client. I have a few other ideas along these lines that prudence dictates I should keep to myself until it can be developed and patented properly. If any of you would like to work with me on such a project, please contact me at dontfeartherepair@gmail.com

If I was an immoral criminal minded asshole, I'd probably create a service like this to get my hands on as many juicy secrets as possible and see what knowledge I could get. Maybe I'll find out some hidden business info that I could make money on, or maybe I could get leverage over on somebody to threaten and blackmail them.

I'm not saying that this is that site's intent, but I'd be cautious about trusting them with anything particularly juicy.

Get you killed? Don't be so melodramatic.

This implementation is a bad idea to use because of the aforementioned security smell.

Another implementation would have to solve the problem of how to ensure message security while still being able to deliver the message at the right time.

The "right" answer for something like this is as you said, lawyers, but "get you killed" is... overly dramatic. Snowden is, after all, still alive.

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