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Comment by tpetry | Hacker News Reader

That problem is solved by how 1Password works:

* Your password vult is encrypted locally and stored on their servers (just an encrypted file!) * To unlock the vault, you need the password and the generated master code. * The master code is a PDF to print, which you can give someone you trust – they still only have half of the things to get access.

The losing of digital life is completely solved. Just print that damn PDF give it to your parents and remember your password.

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Not solved, because your parents could lose a piece of paper (I'd say that's actually a fairly high risk, not just theoretical). Anyone could lose a piece of paper, for that matter. You want multiple, distributed across at least three continents to be sure. The same with your password. ;-)

Sure, you don't have to stop at distributing just once copy…

Even then - this is a fairly ugly solution. You're dependent on an external entity to be responsible with your stuff in the case of an emergency.

I love my friends and family, but I'm not sure I'd trust them to keep a random file/paper for years on end "just in case" and still be able to find it when I need it.

Personally - I went with the "extra yubikey in a safe deposit box" approach, and it still feels super shitty.

I'm not at all a fan of "code is law".

It doesn't even scale. This assumes you're the only one with PDFs to share. What if you have siblings and other relatives, and all of them are tech-savvy -- if they aren't now, in the future they will be -- and want to store the PDFs with your parents.

What, are your parents going to be running a PDF storage service, classified by person? That's too much to ask of them (for most parents).

All these "rebutals" to the pdf approach sound like those infomercial TV ads where people have trouble doing normal day to day things.

Like... mass enail the PDF to several members of the family and be done with it. Can it happen that 5 people at once lose their email access? Sure, but the probability is minuscule.

The comment I was replying to was about physical paper copies, not emails.

Distributing digital copies of your password store to your friends and relatives could maybe work. Be sure you're using a really strong password (that you can also remember by heart), because you cannot trust each friend will store the file responsibly away from prying eyes.

Remember the scenario:

- You lost access to your recovery codes and any handwritten notes, so you better remember the master password by heart.

- But this master password better be really strong, because each of your N friends you distributed your files to is a potential leak to hackers and thieves.

- (Tangentially related: remember you have no authenticator either, so your password store better include recovery codes, otherwise without 2FA you're screwed)

> What, are your parents going to be running a PDF storage service, classified by person?

I mean, it's a piece of paper. They could write the name of the person on the paper, keep them alphabetized, and store and search through hundreds of them easily (let's assume they're rabbits with hundreds of children). There may be all sorts of problems with this approach but I don't think burdening parents with paper storage is one of them.

Edit: of course, if they were rabbits I wouldn't trust them with paper storage. Rabbits are notorious chewers.

I dunno. I've already burdened my parents with plenty of things, and so have my siblings. I don't know that I want to make them responsible for storing random bits of paper they may or may not forget about.

> I'm not at all a fan of "code is law".

You can always not use two factor auth.

And I don't in certain cases (even when I'd like to).

But it's getting increasingly hard to opt out of 2fa on some services.

But not using 2FA comes with its own set of problems. The kind of problems 2FA was introduced to mitigate.

I don't know how you or your friends/parents store important documents but everyone in my bubble has multiple document binders with critical paperwork to keep. Adding a single paper to them is no problem, and the paper is not lost. Stuff is never removed from those binders, just new ones added.

Back when my parents were still in the land of the living, I would've been entirely comfortable believing that the odds of them failing at that would've been low enough that (odds of that failing * odds of my needing that data) would've been stupidly low - low enough I'd've accepted the risk and stopped worrying about it on the basis the likelihood of a problem at that point was significantly lower than many other at least as awful problems and I should focus on mitigating those instead.

And what if someone dies? We'd need something that would do periodic health checks. Preferrably during off-peak hours..

Put it with your will. If you have kids or any amount of savings you should have a will. Store it in two separate locations (your house, and someone else's).

I just store a copy at work. I figure I'm unlikely enough to lose all my possessions without dying at the same time that my workplace gets destroyed.

Not really solved - forgetting a password is where you started. Does it help to say "Just remember the password!"?

It’s a lot easier to remember one specific password. Especially when you need to enter it at regular intervals.

What if you don't really have friends. Not really an uncommon thing.

Put it in a safe deposit box or store it at a notary like a will. There's multiple ways to store a piece of paper offsite without having friends or family.

You still have to be able to prove to THOSE entities that you are who you say you are.

And I say that as someone who has a spare yubikey sitting in a safe deposit box.

Eventually, this would probably work out, but it still feels super shitty.

do you clone the ubikey or enroll two different keys? i struggled to find providers who let you register a second key

You can’t clone a yubikey

You can store keys generated off-device though. Depends which protocols you care about.

I enrolled two different keys.

It's a pain in the butt, and it's very limiting because adding another secure service means going to the bank, so I try to limit the 2fa through yubikeys to things like my password manager, my keycloak instance, and other very important accounts.

My take is that 2fa is still not there yet, and I'm a little worried about the push for webauthn, since I foresee a lot of potentially lost accounts.

That's not a technical problem though. Going to a bank and saying "my house burned down, here's an affidavit or a notarised document stating I am who I say I am" is fairly likely 5o get you access again.

It's SUPPOSED to be a shitty/frustrating/annoying process, not easy. This is your "break glass in case of emergency" solution - you don't want to ever use it and you want it to be super hard for someone else to compromise it.

We have plenty of ways to make this easy but if all those avenues are blocked because of some black swan event, you need a backup - and that backup can't be too easy because then it invites attack.

My first thought in that case would be to store fragments in multiple semi-trusted places that don't know which other semi-trusted places are involved with Shamir's Secret Sharing so "knowing what a majority of the semi-trusted places even are" is a prerequisite to recovery.

Delegating half of the problem to someone else is not what I’d call “completely solved”.

I suppose your point is, nobody should live a life where they can’t trust someone to keep that pdf for them, but it feels to me like solving a technical problem through social means. That’s a fresh take, but it also relies on so many assumptions.

Account security is social. It's using social means to solve a social problem, with a technical bridge.

But this technical problem is unsolvable, our industry lived in arrogance of pretending they solve problems they can't actually they don't, and blaming the user when it fails

Once you have printed out your master key, you might as well go back to writing passwords on a sticky note...

I swear to god sometimes I feel our proffesion mostly consists of people that are a weired combination of arrogant and alternatively gifted. They do not value and do not understand how the rest of society does things.

Hundreds of years ago we have invented this cool thing called a Safe. It works better than 90% of tech-based security systems out there. Write something on a piece of paper, put it behind a locked door, and you will be safe from 99% of scams and attacks that exist. If someone breaks into your house, and get this piece pf paper they will be leaving real fingerprints, and real police will get involved. If noone breaks into your house, then only select few people are ever near that safe.

And even absent a safe... Absent a trusted family member pulling an inside job, how much risk is there really for an average--or even not so average--person to having accounts compromised because someone found passwords written down on a piece of paper somewhere in their house.

Yes, perhaps the equation changes if you have roommates/family you don't really trust.

The trick is to then store it somewhere that anybody who came into posession of it would be unable to figure out -what- master key it was for.

If a friend of mine has an arbitrary chunk of ASCII stored under their google contacts under a name only they and I recognise, absent rubber hose cryptoanalysis of them it's not going to be an issue, and frankly I don't consider that relevant to my threat model - if somebody's -that- excited about my accounts they'll start with the rubber hose on me at which point all bets are already off.

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