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Comment by colordrops | Hacker News Reader

What are you using for a deadman switch?

The system I'd trust most is to have 2 attorneys given sealed envelopes with instructions to give them to your wife on your death. One attorney is given an envelope with the passwords to your accounts (or to your password manager) encrypted with a one time pad. The other attorney is given an envelope with the key to it. Each envelope includes instructions to decrypt. If you're giving her a password to a password manager, make sure she has access to the latest password archive and the software to open it.

Tedious, yes. But fairly reliable and you don't have to place any trust in your attorneys at all, unless they find out who their counterpart is and start working together (very unlikely). If this system wouldn't work for you, you've probably got bigger problems than having to worry about your wife getting into your email after you die.

And for those of us who aren't wealthy enough to have two different attorneys on retainer, giving your spouse the encrypted password store along with the key to a safety deposit box containing the decryption key would have to do.

Personally, my wife would wonder why I'm going to so much trouble to keep my passwords secret from her until I die; but then my personal password store is for services we share like banking, and any passwords she doesn't know are benign things like my email addresses and various website logins that wouldn't matter anyway when I die. Of course I also have my work passwords (I'm the IT manager), but my supervisor and the company owner each have a secured store of all of my work passwords as well, plus the master password to access them, in the event something happens to me (or I'm just on vacation for a week and temporarily unreachable when access is needed).

This is more of a thought experiment, but would also serve as a decent backup in case of natural disaster, house burning down, etc. As for safety deposit boxes, those can be closed out for nonpayment, bank branches will shut down, etc. Not the best hands off long term solution. An attorney will let you know if there's an issue because it's their ass on the line if they don't.

Unless they die.

That's why you use Shamir's Secret Sharing...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamir%27s_Secret_Sharing

If they work in a firm that's all taken care of.

I'd just write down my accounts and passwords on an index card, laminate it, and give it to my wife to store in the safety deposit box.

Much less tedious, and concentrates trust in the one person who should have it - the spouse!

Last I paid attention, some jurisdictions make it very difficult to access the contents of a safe deposit box after one of the owners has died. (Supposedly to discourage cheating on inheritance taxes with gold coins, or ...)

A bit of research might be indicated, before trusting this strategy to perform when needed.

She could store it in her safety deposit box. Or in a fire safe we keep at home. Or buried in a tin can in the backyard.

Google has Inactive Account Manager https://myaccount.google.com/inactive

Google and Bitwarden both have built-in features for this.

So does Lastpass.

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