Due to bike-induced concussions, I've been worried for a while about losing my memory and not being able to log back in.
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!
Unless your work and life need to be very secretive, or involve matters of national or international importance, I personally think a simpler printed/written format that works without electronics/Internet would be a better option. Of course, the printed details can have simple encryption, which your family/friends can break using day-to-day quirks you shared, such as the family secret codes, the name of that pet in the town you grew up in, or the middle name from the story of your great-grandfather, etc.
Some time ago, my mother-in-law (erstwhile teacher) and my godmother-aunty (businesswoman) began to forget many things. Their kids have tried quite a few phone apps and whatnot with electronics. Finally, I have suggested enforcing just two things: a lot of Valet bowls around the house (at common places in all the rooms) and pocket notebooks with pens attached. They just write anything and everything, from money to kitchen items to anything they want. If they forgot something, refer to the notebooks. If a key is lost, try the Valet Bowl. Now, my plan is to train their muscle memory to drop/pick from the bowl (don’t try to remember) and write things down.
The idea of Valet Bowls comes from something someone mentioned on Hacker News.
(Funny how I can remember this comment from many months ago after never implementing the bowls, but I currently can’t remember where my car keys are. Should have implemented the bowls…)
For keys, there is only one place: the Keyholder wall-mounted near the main door, while still visible from the main Hall. Not easy to pick and go by “guests” without being seen by someone, but easy for residents to just walk out with one. I got the exact same ones from Amazon and wall-mounted them in all the homes where I serve as Printer-Repair Guy. 10+ years, I kinda have trained every family member’s muscle memory, “Keys go there and only there.” ;-)
Add/Edit: I also have a sticker I printed stuck to the Keyholder, in Monica’s words from Friends, “Got the Keys?”
Thank you past me for thinking about future me. Present me happy.
Im also quite more practical - there are responsabilities that may go beyond a simple memory loss - eg. If one is in a coma or just hospitalized for a long period of time; trusted third parties may require access to your accounts even for simple stuff like paying bills/rent/cloud services.
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.
While the fire resulted in the total loss of the house it was actually the water from the fire department not the heat that did proportionally more damage.
As a mental model you shouldn’t think of it as “what if my house burns down?” so much as “what if nice strangers roll up to my windows and chainsaw through my roof and spray 50,000 gallons of water in here?”
Yes everything in the mechanical room melted but everything in the rest of the house got hot, smoky, soaked and then moldy.
For root of trust materiel like social security cards, cash, passports put in a ziplock bag in a fireproof, waterproof safe. But for other storage I use clear “Ezy Storage” brand stackable 50L tubs labeled with Homebox QR codes. In the US, Target and Home Depot frequently stock them. I am very anti black and yellow tubs.
The majority of work post-fire goes to itemizing your house inventory for insurance. Even cataloging all your bathroom’s soaps by brand name rather than generic can make $100 difference. Multiply that by 500x different things.
From a threat model perspective I look at rooms from a “what would be salvageable in here if I emptied a swimming pool’s worth of water from some fire sprinklers”. Furniture and TVs are easy to replace. Other stuff less so.
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.
If your house and PC burn, restore from online backup.
If your brain burns, spouse restores from vault.
Something you keep in your home that no one knows about won't be inventoried.
Is there a better class of safe one could use that might be more successful even if not a guarantee? F/e even with a safe deposit box, one might still have some lower-tier items that would be impractical to store in one but you might want to do better than just out in the open.
The bank will seal the box as soon as they discover you are dead, and require a court order. Without a will, the executor will be whatever statutory person your state calls for.
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.
In a lower trust scenario you could probably use a lawyer as a broker of the secret (potentially even as part of a will).
I like the idea of the lawyer, unlike normal people, they like sticking to their promises.
Had the same idea years ago (same hashicorp lib too) but lost motivation to polish it to the point I felt confident enough to Show HN. https://github.com/xkortex/passcrux
But given recent events, I want to restart work on it.
My use-case revolved more around preserving a master password e.g. to a password manager. I also wanted to support self-hosted backup, like hiding shares and giving directions to the parts to trusted friends. The shamir sharing part was straightforward but i really want to add forward error-correction to protect against partial data loss.
* you forget that you have a clever password scheme
* you forget that you have data to decrypt
* your mental capacities are deteriorated enough that someone else takes over decisions making for you. This person may not know you or your data protection scheme.
* you are physically injured where biometrics are non functional. Or a biometric system with a limit on tries may have been tripped by those trying to help you.
* you were in an incident that your friends/family were also affected by
In my opinion, the best way to protect against these is simply write stuff down in plaintext somewhere that relies on physical security, like with documents in your home. Also notate what they are and why someone would need to access them and how.
https://michael-solomon.net/keybearer
https://github.com/msolomon/keybearer
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!
* If my use of the word 'Americans' above is triggering, feel free to substitute it with 'people'.