Comment by echo42null
1 day ago
How would you build a dead man’s switch for pass? I’d like my family to be able to access my store if I disappear, but not before. The obvious problem: to re-encrypt for their keys I’d need my private GPG key running somewhere, which defeats the point. Has anyone solved this cleanly without leaving a hot key around?
The beauty of pass is that there's a distinction between giving access to the encrypted vault vs giving access to decryption, and you can leverage this.
How I've been doing this is that I have 2 (sets of) backup people. The first set has access to the repo, but can't decrypt. The second set can decrypt (i.e. I have their pubkeys imported), but don't have access to the repo. I've chosen the people such that it's unlikely they collude against me, but in case something happens it's likely they'll be able to get in touch with each other.
There's also other possible approaches: e.g. instead of building a dead man's switch based on the encryption, you can build a dead man's switch based on the data. I.e. you'll use their pubkeys for encryption, but the repo itself is behind a dead man's switch.
Thanks, I totally forgot about both sides; I only looked on the side of the key.
key sharding with a trusted third party? computer systems can't know of your death, or even true time, so you have to trust something like a company holding the secrets for you, or your lawyer...