Comment by kylehotchkiss
19 days ago
I've broken into Physical Safes using nothing more than a drill with a half inch bit (I was young and didn't want to drag myself to harbor freight to sacrifice a more suitable tool). Enough boreholes and I had access.
In hindsight, looking harder for the key would probably have been fruitful.
Nothing says you cannot trivially encode the paper password. Those in the know understand that you need to append “BoomShakalaka”, replace “A” with “Q”, or some other super simple modification to what is recorded.
Maybe the NSA would be willing to brute force the infinite variations from that starting seed, but it is still effectively locked for mortals.
I've thought about making a "word search" and embedding the passphrase in it using a pattern (e.g., a subset of a Knight's tour, a space-filling curve overlay, or some other sampling algorithm).
https://www.passwordcard.org/en
I used to keep a password card in my wallet and had a pattern I would use.
If you add an explicit reminder to check the email where you explained the modification, then the idea seems solid. Tough at that point put half the password on paper and send the other half to a whole bunch of trusted people.