What will happen to your crypto keys when you die?

[Jon Callas]

On Jul 1, 2009, at 4:29 PM, silky wrote:

> On Wed, Jul 1, 2009 at 6:48 PM, Udhay Shankar N<udhay at pobox.com>  
> wrote:
>> Udhay Shankar N wrote, [on 5/29/2009 9:02 AM]:
>>> Fascinating discussion at boing boing that will probably be of  
>>> interest
>>> to this list.
>>>
>>> http://www.boingboing.net/2009/05/27/what-will-happen-to.html
>>
>> Followup article by Cory Doctorow:
>>
>> http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/jun/30/data-protection-internet
>
> A potentially amusing/silly solution would be to have one strong key
> that you change monthly, and then, encrypt *that* key, with a method
> that will be brute-forceable in 2 months and make it public. As long
> as you are constantly changing your key, no-one will decrypt it in
> time, but assuming you do die, they can potentially decrypt it while
> arranging your funeral :)

I'll point out that PGP has had key splitting for ages now. You can  
today make a strong public key and split it into N shares, of which  
two or three shares are needed to reconstitute the key, and hand those  
out to trusted loved ones.

You can then use that public key for files, virtual disks, whole disk  
volumes -- anywhere you could use an RSA or Elgamal key -- and be  
assured that your data is safe in the absence of a conspiracy of those  
loved ones.

It's there now, and has been there for a decade.

	Jon

---------------------------------------------------------------------
The Cryptography Mailing List
Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo at metzdowd.com