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Comment by fragmede | Hacker News Reader

what do you if you get mugged and you laptop and phone and keys are taken or stolen from you? or lost?

After this party, this guy needed help, he lost his wallet and his phone, his sister also went to the party and gave him a ride there but had left. he didn't know her number to call her, and she'd locked down her socials so we couldn't use my phone to contact her. we were lucky that his socials weren't super locked down and managed to find someone that way, but priv keys are only good so long as you have them.

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> what do you if you get mugged and you laptop and phone and keys are taken or stolen from you? or lost?

My ssh keys are encrypted. They need a password, or they are worthless.

Sure, I can mistype that password as well, but doing so has no effect on the remote system, as the ssh client already fails locally.

You can and you should back up your keys. There isn't a 100% safe, secure and easy method that shields you from everything that can possibly happen, but there are enough safe, secure and easy ones to cover vast majority of cases other than a sheer catastrophe, which is good enough not to use outdated and security prone mechanisms like passwords on network exposed service.

I use a yubikey. You need a password to use the key. It has it's own brute force management that is far less punishing than a remote SSH server deciding to not talk to me anymore.

but what do you do if you don't have the key? unless it's implanted (which, https://dangerousthings.com/), I don't know that I won't lose it somehow.

My keyboard has a built in USB hub and ports. They key lives there. They keyboard travels with me. It's hard to lose.

I have a backup key in storage. I have escrow mechanisms. These would be inconvenient, but, it's been 40 years since I've lost any keys or my wallet, so I feel pretty good about my odds.

Which is what the game here is. The odds. Famously humans do poorly when it comes to this.

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