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Comment by joshuaheard | Hacker News Reader

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.

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Or 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.

Seems 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.

>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?

Yes, but I change the master password often, so the printed list is a backup.

FWIW 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.

You'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.

I guess I didn't think this through. Looks like I need to upgrade my situation.

I would not say this online, my man.

Update: 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.

eh..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.

> 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?

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