What are your emergency plans for your password manager?
I was just thinking about my password manager and use of 2FA. If I lost my phone or what if I get in some accident and have amnesia and cannot remember my master password. What would I do?
Any thoughts on solutions to the problem of losing your phone or some emergency medical condition?
Amnesia - I wound not know that I have a password manager. I wound be very screwed. No one else in family even understand what it is. I don’t know what to do about it. At least they know I have a Gmail account. But I don’t use it for logins. Maybe I can regain access to my domain with BankID. I have the password file on phone, server and on my workstation. So I will be fine regarding hardware failure.
I have my keypass file synced on multiple devices locked with a strong password and a keyfile. So if I lose my phone, I still have access to my file on another device. All of my devices are encrypted too.
I keep my vault password in fireproof containers in two separate off-site locations. And I use BitWarden, which has an emergency access process. I would assume many other vaults do too.
2FA backups are also stored in locations separate from where I have the vault password.
I also backup my vault a few times a year and keep those encrypted in another digital location.
I keep all mine in a Keepass file across multiple USB drives that get updated about once a month. Wife has one, one lives at my mothers house, and I keep one on me - at all times airgapped so no risk to have them exfiltrated either. Keepass has some plugins in order to support 2FA as well. This keeps me using unique passwords everywhere, TOTP codes easily accessible, wife can get access to something if she needs; she knows my master password scheme - but is not really a technophile so she doesn’t really want to mess with it unless she has to.
Keepass 2 also has an emergency sheet you can print as well to hide in a safe. It has all of your passwords and master passwords too. Keep another one offsite (plus USB stick with kbdx file) and you’ll be good.
“Keepass2” seems like it’s an Android app. I will never store my passwords on a device which is literally designed to steal your data. Granted, it’s probably still a million times better than trying to trust someone like Lastpass, but I’m paranoid.
Keepass 2 is an open source software for desktop that was ported to Android and iOS. Frankly both phones and desktops spy on you so much I don’t consider either any more secure.
Android has a Linux kernel that sits on top of another locked down kernel which has full access to everything, in binary blobs that prevent recreation of the environment by you or I from source code. There’s a big difference.
I have my master password written on a piece of paper in my desk drawer, but with no references to what it’s for. I guess if someone broke into my house, managed to unlock my computer or my phone and also put two and two together that it’s my master password, they could get in.
But if something happened to me, that password location is known to my family, and my vault has a backup 2FA to my son’s phone.
Right now I export it periodically to an encrypted flash drive but I know that isn’t sufficient. I run Vaultwarden and back up all my docker volumes hourly and replicate to S3 nightly.
Theoretically I should be able to recover but I need some off those passwords to do so. Ideally local caching or one of my exports should be sufficient but I haven’t had time to actually test this.
I have my password database synced multiple places and I use two yubikeys (one as a backup) to unlock said password database and for OTP. This protects me from losing access to anything as a result of a lost/broken device.
It doesn’t help in the case of being unable to perform those functions yourself for whatever reason. Perhaps give instructions on how to access all of that to someone trusted?
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