How will my loved ones break my password?

Just a few days ago I posted about a new Swiss web service from DataInherit to manage the life cycle of your sensitive data and credentials. Coincidentally Cory Doctorow has an article in the Guardian this week on the same topic, fretting about passwords being carried off with loved ones into the next life. While creating a will with his wife, Doctorow was stumped by how to deal with his data, and specifically the secrets that protect that data. His various hard disks are protected by AES-128 bit encryption and a passphrase that is unlikely to succumb to anything less than quantum leaps in quantum computing. So while Doctorow feels safe against attacks on his data, he wonders about the following scenario:

But what if I were killed or incapacitated before I managed to hand the passphrase over to an executor or solicitor who could use them to unlock all this stuff that will be critical to winding down my affairs – or keeping them going, in the event that I'm incapacitated?

After considering several technical and non-technical approaches he finally decided on the following solution

I'd split the passphrase in two, and give half of it to my wife, and the other half to my parents' lawyer in Toronto. The lawyer is out of reach of a British court order, and my wife's half of the passphrase is useless without the lawyer's half (and she's out of reach of a Canadian court order).

Doctorow remarks that the surprising outcome of this process was the realisation that we are missing a well-known service for handling key escrow in an era of military grade encryption being available to home users. He concludes that “you need to figure this stuff out, before you get hit by a bus and doom your digital life to crypto oblivion”. I think that DataInherit will be giving him a call.