If you have a "master password", for something like KeePass, which can then decrypt everything else, how do you ensure that you would always be able to remember that original password?
For example, say you get in some accident and you lose your memory of the password, or maybe you just get older and gradually forget it. Maybe you encrypt a drive, and think you've lost it, and find it later but can't remember what password you used originally.
How could you be sure that you could always figure out your password, even with brain damage, but no one else could ever figure it out?
I was thinking, maybe some sort of steganographic tattoo? Writing the password down is obviously the worst option, but if you can do it in a way that isn't obvious, you could perhaps jump start your memory enough to proceed. Even then though, I can't think of any numeric values, or other unique (yet secret) identifiers a human has outside of their own mind.
maybe the answer is "if your brain fails in that way, the data is gone forever." but surely there must be a better solution. Even in military situations, surely there is no mission-critical data that is stored solely in the mind of a person.
Easy to remember, hard to crack, different for every device/account
Ethan Reyes
No, you use the same password for everything with some shit stuck on the end As soon as your password gets leaked in plaintext or cracked as a hash ur fucked How are you this stupid
>for my reddit account nvm that explains it
Nolan Young
Write it down and hide it in the woods
Blake Sullivan
reverse serial number of drive modify as you see fit to trigger the "jumpstart"
Noah Campbell
how do you know where you hid it though? i'm suggesting a very unlikely situation, and realistically you'll probably never "lose your memory" in such a specific way. however, the future is unknown. the best thing i can think of would be using a password hint to reference some aspect of your past that is only significant to you, and generating a mnemonic from that.
as an example, your "plain text" password hint would be "birthplace", and you were born at "North West Hospital, New York", and you've got some mnemonic for NWHNY.
or maybe your grandad called you "Scout", so you have some mnemonic on S C O U T.
that still runs the risk of being forgettable, but if you use it often enough, the identifier should be able to remind you (more than just relying on memory alone).
Adrian Green
Use a data crypt for all of your master-passwords and implant it into your body. Best somewhere near a vital organ, so unless you die in the accident, any limb loss will not affect the crypt. Either something like NFC in the chip, or only physical access, requiring you to cut it out to get at the data.
all account passwords can be reset with knowing your email's password
everything else you personally encrypt must not be important if you let a single point of failure prevent access to it two is one and one is none
Jose Adams
i think about being able to generate a password from somewhere that is public information, and always retrievable. a very very simple (and bad one to use) would be like, using a line from the bible, and then having the reference (like john 3:16) be somewhere visible yet innocuous in your life.
for a better security example, say you have a library, or even a textbook from school. you remember the name of the book, a page number, and a paragraph number. you use that line from the book as your password, and then even if you forget the content of the password, so long as you remember the generation method you could always retrieve it, even if you lost the book.
