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Ive been thinking about how to implement a dead mans switch for passwords or private keys. A remote server that is synced with your local login and will change the password to something random every x hours unless you 'check in'. If you do check in, your password works, if you dont check in because you are being held or have had your phone taken away from you then it will change it to something random.

Problems to solve at the moment are the security of the remote server, recovery after you let go of the switch and how ti implement the sync (instead of a remote connection, something like a shared secret used as a generation seed, like RSA tokens, that only needs to be synced once).



Yeah the issue is in recovery. As a general rule, when I've attempted to implement something like this, I run into the issue of "if I can recover, they can force me to" :( would be seriously interested in a solution if you come up with one!


I like that. I think there's a market for key combinations, passwords or even facial recognition to say "I've been compromised, scramble everything"




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