Posted by eljojo 3 hours ago
I combined shamir secret sharing (hashicorp vault's implementation) with age-encryption, and packaged it using WASM for a neat in-browser offline UX.
The idea is that if something happens to me, my friends and family would help me get back access to the data that matters most to me. 5 out of 7 friends need to agree for the vault to unlock.
Try out the demo in the website, it runs entirely in your browser!
A bank safe deposit box offers a different security profile that’s probably more robust against fire because banks burn less often than houses.
It’s probably not practical to really be robust against fire without being buried several feet deep.
In December 2025, items worth an estimated €30 million were stolen from a Sparkasse bank in the Gelsenkirchen suburb of Buer, Germany. The thieves used a large drill to break into the bank's underground vault and proceeded to crack over 3,000 safe deposit boxes.
The vast majority of these don’t make the news because there’s no proof there was even anything inside the box in the first place so anyone could be lying.
> Mr. Pluard, who tracks legal filings and news reports, estimates that around 33,000 boxes a year are harmed by accidents, natural disasters and thefts.
> Oddly, the bank returned to him five watches that weren’t his. “They were the wrong color, the wrong size — totally different than what I had,” Mr. Poniz said. “I had no idea where they came from.”
ex: https://www.cbc.ca/news/safety-deposit-box-protection-1.7338...
https://archive.is/www.nytimes.com/2019/07/19/business/safe-...
It's great if you want to store some documents. But don't expect _real_ security. It's guarded by a minimum-wage employee, and the keys are usually laughably insecure. Banks know this, so they cap their liability for the loss of the deposit box at around $1000.
So don't even think about storing gold bars there, like they do in movies.
There _are_ companies that provide safe storage for high-value items, but they are pretty exotic.
On the internet, it's either: Public for anyone in the whole world, or impossible to recover if anything goes wrong.
In hindsight, looking harder for the key would probably have been fruitful.
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 used to keep a password card in my wallet and had a pattern I would use.
In a lower trust scenario you could probably use a lawyer as a broker of the secret (potentially even as part of a will).
It would be nice if your Apple account could be unlocked with some other keys as well apart from the primary one, but I guess that is what Apple calls the “Legacy Contact Key”.
Edit: okay so the keychain is excluded from this. So back to storing each others passwords in eachothers keychain…
I like the idea of the lawyer, unlike normal people, they like sticking to their promises.
You can discard/modify part of a password before sending it to your backend. Then, when you log in the server has to brute force the missing part.
One could extend this with security questions like how many children pets and cars you own. What color was your car in 2024. Use that data to aid brute forcing.
The goal would be to be able to decrypt with fewer than 5 shards but make it as computation heavy as you like. If no one remembers the pink car it will take x hours longer.
https://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/20578/definition-...
Also, kudos for packaging it as a static web app. That's the one platform I'm willing to bet will still function in 10 years.
I wonder who would not only have the passwords, but the know-how to manage the whole thing, at least to transition it to more managed services...
If you want someone to be able to access it after you’re gone, either put 1000 BTC in it or leave instructions. Paper instructions in a physical fireproof safe is way easier to deal with than any digital encryption with no hints.
You need to give people "a map" of where things are: https://github.com/eljojo/rememory/blob/main/internal/projec...
(If you have a trusted third party, you can also enforce a cooling off period: e.g. that any attempt to access results in a notification to the account holder that if not denied within some time period, access is granted)
However, there is still the issue of the service provider going offline or out of business which we don't have a solution for yet.
We have started with a good password manager and will be adding digital inheritance/social recovery soon! [0]
Take a look, thoughts and feedback welcome.
for the time lock mechanism, how do you go about it? I'm interested in exploring using drand time lock, but that also relies on the service continuing to run (which is admittedly very likely) https://github.com/drand/tlock
This is obviously more cumbersome, and probably costly, if you intend on changing your password. I guess you could change the part of it you don’t store with them.
my zip bundles are 1-2 megabytes due to all the wasm, and you achieved this on so little. impressive job!
I'd love to hear what you think about mine, one of the differences is that it creates a ZIP file containing the recovery app in it, as well as a PDF with instructions for non-technical friends. Overall trying to make the recovery experience as smooth as possible.
but cheers, your version is the only one that I found that does basically what mine does, all the others fall short one way or another!
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20230610235249/http://bash.org/?...
also RIP bash.org found out thru you :(
https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/share-passwords-iphe6...
https://support.apple.com/guide/icloud/share-files-and-folde...
This is the sort of stuff that terrifies me https://hey.paris/posts/appleid/
(At home of course, people get pissy if you do this at work!)
Thankfully my very long password I use for an encrypted Borgbackup I have was somewhere deep or untouched, but, otherwise I would have been fucked. Also, the backup codes Google told me they would always accept failed and it wasn't until I found a random unused Android device in a drawer that had been unused for a year was I able to get access back to my Google account of ~25 years.
this exact story is why i built my app, thank you so much for sharing.
my hope is to basically make a next version of your plan that's distributed among friends.