When I’m dead, how will my loved ones break my password?
Cory Doctorow reflects in his latest Guardian column — which is subtitled “Tales from the encrypt” — on how important it is to have a secure, long-term solution for decrypting our data if we croak.
“What I found surprising all through this process was the lack of any kind of standard process for managing key escrow as part of estate planning. Military-grade crypto has been in civilian hands for decades now, and yet every lawyer I spoke to about this was baffled (and the cypherpunks I spoke to were baffling – given to insanely complex schemes that suggested to me that their executors were going to be spending months unwinding their keys before they could get on with the business of their estates, and woe betide their survivors, who’d be left in the cold while all this was taking place).
Meanwhile, I’m left with this conclusion: if you’re not encrypting your data, you should be. And if you are encrypting your data, you need to figure this stuff out, before you get hit by a bus and doom your digital life to crypto oblivion.”
