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Ask Slashdot: How To Keep Keyfiles Secure, But Still Accessible?
New submitter castionsosa writes: With various utilities like borgbackup, NetBackup, zbackup, and others, one uses a keyfile on the client as the way to encrypt and decrypt data. Similar with PGP, GnuPG, and other OpenPGP utilities for the private keys. However, there is a balance between security (keeping the keyfile in as few places as possible) and recoverability (keeping many copies of it). Go too far one way, and one will be unable to restore after a disaster. Go far the other way, and the encryption can wind up compromised.
I have looked at a few methods. PaperBack (which allows one to print a binary file, then scan it) gives mixed results, and if there is any non-trivial misalignment, it won't retrieve. Printing a uuencoded version out is doable, but there would be issues for scanning, or worse retyping. There is obviously media storage (USB flash drive, CD-ROM), but flash isn't an archival grade medium, and optical drives are getting rarer as time goes on. Of course, stashing a keyfile in the cloud isn't a wise idea, because once one loses physical control of the medium the file is stored on, one can't be sure where it can end up, and encrypting it just means another key (be it a passphrase or another keyfile) is stored somewhere else. I settled upon having a physical folder in a few locations which contains a USB flash drive, CD-R, and a printed copy, but I'm sure there is a better way to do this.
Has anyone else run into this, either for personal recoverability of encrypted data, or for a company? Any suggestions for striking a balance between being able to access keyfiles after disasters of various sizes (ransomware, fire, tornado, hurricane) while keeping them out of the wrong hands?
I have looked at a few methods. PaperBack (which allows one to print a binary file, then scan it) gives mixed results, and if there is any non-trivial misalignment, it won't retrieve. Printing a uuencoded version out is doable, but there would be issues for scanning, or worse retyping. There is obviously media storage (USB flash drive, CD-ROM), but flash isn't an archival grade medium, and optical drives are getting rarer as time goes on. Of course, stashing a keyfile in the cloud isn't a wise idea, because once one loses physical control of the medium the file is stored on, one can't be sure where it can end up, and encrypting it just means another key (be it a passphrase or another keyfile) is stored somewhere else. I settled upon having a physical folder in a few locations which contains a USB flash drive, CD-R, and a printed copy, but I'm sure there is a better way to do this.
Has anyone else run into this, either for personal recoverability of encrypted data, or for a company? Any suggestions for striking a balance between being able to access keyfiles after disasters of various sizes (ransomware, fire, tornado, hurricane) while keeping them out of the wrong hands?
I don't know why you think that scanning things is going to be hard, OCR works very well these days, especially if you use a font like OCR-A which is intended for scanning. You can also print out a checksum of the key if you'd like as well. Or you could use some QR code variant to store the key too. Storing digital data on paper is mostly a solved problem these days.
Then again, it doesn't sound like you actually want any solutions, you just want to rule all of them out...
How big are these keyfiles? QR codes can encode up to 4,296 characters, and have alignment-assisting and error-correcting features built in.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QR_code
Join the Illuminati.
Why not print the encrypted key as a QR Code?
Similarly, you could use Shamir Secret Sharing with a theshold to break the key up into N shares which could be provided to people you trust. Then, your (or those you designate - include law enforcement) could recover the keys provided they have the threshold number of shares.
Maybe when burning such info into a crystal becomes cheaper and feasible for the common person, it could be burned into one for all posterity.
There should be a federal registry for keyfiles. That way, in the event of having a warrant and needing to conduct a search, law enforcement readily has access to the keyfile. You benefit from this because there's a secure backup maintained by the government rather than a business that can change the services they provide, be sold, or cease to operate. A federal registry is a great solution to these problems.
Is the way to go.
The fact that fewer and fewer people use them simply increases your security.
If and when you replace your PC with a device that doesn't have an optical drive, then the last thing you do with your old PC is to copy the data from the disks to something new.
Till then, the fading popularity of DVDs is just an added layer of security for you.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Sometimes. Or, to abuse an old phrase: "It's not the hack that has your name on it you have to worry about...it's all those other ones marked 'To whom it may concern."
Simple: require a passphrase to access the private keys, then back then up like any other file. PGP utilities allow this, and it should suffice for anything interactive.
For anything non-interactive, it may be still be possible to use a passphrase if there is a way to load the passphrase from disk (rather then keyboard); keep the files containing passphrases as private as they keys themselves, but just recreate them if they're lost. *Something* along the line has to be committed to human memory, otherwise you fall foul to the cryptographic equivalent of the "analogue hole" (I.e. if everything needed to decrypt the data is available without human intervention, an attacker just needs that data, they don't need you).
Kangaru USB. Install a liveCD distribution with the keyfile on it. Make sure the keyfile has a password and the foldser where you keep said keyfinle is a partition readable by the various OS's you expect to use. If you're really paranoid, make the livecd ecrypt the default user home directory, though you may not be able to mount this easily on another system to access the keyfile, particularly if it's not Linux.
Now you can plug and play as needed. The Kangaru USB locks write with a hardware switch and you have a full known good boot environment if you need it. Image the USB and save it somewhere else off line if desired. [ Phones should never be considered secure if they are attached to any network at any time, unless you believe obscurity is a reasonable security measure for yourself ].
This being said, if the computing hardware is nefarious by design nothing is going to protect your keyfile if you use it.
Hey, the guy is asking a legitimate question! It is NOT settled in any of the F500 that are among my past clients.
YOU may decide you've solved the problem with your trivial answer and offensive title, but speaking for everyone as if you're a demigod is one of the reasons many of us only rarely contribute to /. conversations!
(And, yes, I'm posting as AC, so I can't be abused on-line by you, and people of your ilk!)
Keeping physical copies of keys or keyfiles makes them subject to being seized by LE upon the serving of a subpoena, at least in the U.S.
This Sig does not Exist.
Not the DoD? Not your bank? Not your credit card company?
What a trivial and offensive reply from someone with no grasp of the scale of the problem!
So keep multiple forms of the same key in as few places as you like. You know, as a 2D barcode (QR, other), using PaperBack, on a CD and on a flash key, and so on. Oh, and mind that PaperBack facilitates retyping, so you don't have to retype uu/base64/otherwise encoded stuff, if scanning either fails.
Saying this isn't any better than saying "if you've done nothing wrong, you've got nothing to hide."
You use encryption to protect your privacy from a US government that no longer understands what the 4th amendment is.
As for backups, you can backup your private key with a password and throw it on a couple USB drives stored in different locations. I've printed out my encrypted RSA key. Elliptic curve keys are small enough that you can usually print them out with QR codes (even after encrypted).
Failing figuring out how to encrypt your key for every random program, I would just throw them all in veracrypt, and then again, few different USB drives, ideally not stored in the same place. Check on them every six months or a year or so.
I find putting my data in a room with a locked door is pretty effective.
Easy solution: Use a good passphrase, and a secure computer. Have a dedicated computer that is well protected and that you don't install random crap on. Back the key up properly.
Harder solution: Use a smartcard, for instance a Yubikey. They allow keeping the key safely on a small USB device that fits on a keychain. The key never leaves the smartcard, and in the very worst case, a compromise still doesn't retrieve your key, it can only succeed in signing stuff while the key is physically in the computer.
The downside is that it can take some messing around to get it to work, and that many smartcards are limited in the key size they allow, for instance the Yubikey only accepts 2048 bit keys.
But chmod 600 is a start.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography
Upload it to torrent sites with the title "Paris Hilton Sex Tape.mpg"
It will look like non-working garbage to most people, and no one will know it's your encryption key. Then when you need to decrypt your stuff just download it again.
Mod parent up.
Yes - USB drives are not archival quality storage. But no - they're not expensive. I have several dozen el cheapo flash drives in my desk drawer, most of which were freebies. Just back up on to a cheap storage medium multiple times. If you're so worried that a flash drive won't survive until you need it (Protip: it will, for about 10 years. Then just rewrite it and you're good for another ten years. They wear out from use, not electrical charge leakage.), then make 10 backups. I'd bet my big toe that at least one of them will survive a couple of generations. Keep one or two passphrase encrypted copies online somewhere (not necessarily cloud storage - online meaning you don't need to fetch a thumb drive for it), and you've got a good compromise. For corporate use, just use a safety deposit box with a few thumbdrives and reflash them once a year. That's simple, effective, and secure enough for most applications.
What do I do? I keep my KeePass database (which contains many encryption keys) on a cloud storage provider. The combination of passphrase and keyfile encryption is good enough for me, and strikes the balance I need between ease of use, accessibility, and security.
You're overanalyzing. This is a solved problem. Make multiple backups, some offline, and store them in a secure location, e.g. the parent's suggestion of a safety deposit box.
"Government is like fire; a handy servant, but a dangerous master." -- George Washington
Memorize it. Yes, it'll take much time & effort, but ...
That is really your only option, unless you want to invest seriously in archival-grade tape. There used to be MOD, but nobody cared enough about their data to keep the technology alive and DVD-RAM was a poor substitute. Nothing else has good endurance.
As to paper, print QR-codes, either with a good laser or pigmented ink. Then keep several redundant copies in a bank-vault. For convenience, you can, of course keep several different good-quality memory sticks in that vault as well, but do not depend on them and refresh them at least once a year.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Keep one copy in a safe in a tamper evident container. Either hardcopy or something like a read-only SD card or USB thumb drive will work. Routinely open the safe and verify that the key container hasn't been compromised.
Distribute copies to trusted parties in tamper evident containers. You can also split the key up into multiple pieces and distribute different pieces to different people. Don't let anyone know who else has copies. You will also need to routinely visit these trusted parties and confirm that they have not tampered with the key container.
Be sure to protect your private key with a wrapping passphrase if supported, otherwise use encrypted media. You should also specify a reasonable expiration date for your key and use the appropriate revocation mechanism, e.g. CRLs for x509 certs and revocation certificates for PGP. You shouldn't be too worried about the longevity of your storage media since you should be periodically updating your keys. I would recommend against media with photosensitive dyes and go with the more robust M-Disc based discs.
If at all possible, do not ever let your private key touch a networked/unsecure device. Use a hardware based key manager if possible, e.g. Yubikey. Keep a separate machine booted from read-only media for the sole purpose of key creation in a secured location. You can also use this machine for encryption/decryption, but you need to transfer data via sneakernet. Definitely don't keep a WiFi card or even an audio output device in the machine. Do all of your work inside a Faraday Cage if possible.
Read up on guidance from the various organizations. E.G. NIST's Computer Security Resource Center
Get a safety deposit box from a bank, put the key there as an ASCII armored plaintext paper and as a QR code printed on paper. And remember to use quality paper and a laser printer. The only ones who could get access to the key would be robbers and government officials with warrants.
-SR
OP, why do you hate America so much? Encryption is something used by criminals, terrorists, and pedophiles; are you one of those? Perhaps you'd better check yourself, Comrade Castionsosa. Think of the children!
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Congratulations, you completely missed the point. And you were an ass about it. And no, for anybody competent, this is most decidedly not a settled question, unless you spend a lot of money on it (archival-grade tape) and even there it takes constant re-evaluation and people manage to screw it up.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Well, I'm not afraid to say it next to my name; the answer was just horseshit.
There isn't a one-size-fits-all answer. I've contracted for restaurants, and I've contracted for banks. The answer is very different depending which one it is. You can't generalize the answer from the question, you have to extend the question to include use cases or other context analysis.
The fact he even said it makes me wonder if he even knows what things like specifications and requirements are.
Clearly step one. Encrypt them, and I assume you can store a good key somehow in a way that you have no worry of ever losing control of it.
Then simply file for some government program where all applications are public record and attach the encrypted file to the document.
Presto, free storage and easy retrieval. It worked for leaking Scientology Documents, it can work for you too!
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
I use hints for my passwords and then keep the ID plus hint in a list on my smartphone's notes. The master list of hints to passwords is kept on my main PC at home with a printout kept in a safe in the bedroom.
I tend to have 3 "classes" of passwords, stuff for common access which I don't care if it gets hacked, stuff for midlevel access (where I do care but I wouldn't have any actual loss if I did) and banking level type stuff.
common stuff I had about 2 passwords I would regularly use, mid-level stuff had about 6 I would cycle through and the high -end security about a dozen passwords.
This actually worked pretty well up until the last year or so where my password count has exploded because various accounts now enforce different rules/lengths for naming and my work recently went to separate web based hosting and bug tracking systems each requiring their own sets of passwords (and lots of both personal and work sites have started enforcing password expiration)
Key files, certs, etc. are all convoluted versions of the same thing - a secret.
Your question is really: "How do I keep my secrets secure?"
The answer is, as always: "Memorize them."
If your secrets are too complex or too numerous to memorize, you will need to write them down.
Because you're not an idiot, you write them down encrypted, and memorize that key so you can decrypt it later. This key is your secret.
If you're doing it correctly, you won't care where you store the encrypted secrets, because the security requirement is effectively binary. If you have security set to "on" because you used strong encryption, then you can turn accessibility to over 9000.
Throw your password database on a public FTP and let the world have it. You'll be long dead before the encryption is cracked.
If you're paranoid and you think usable quantum computers are really 5-10 years away, or that every encryption algorithm is flawed and backdoored, then you need to rely on hiding as well to turn security on. Put your shit on a micro SD card and hide it. Or, hide your shit by embedding it into innocuous data (digital or physical) steganographically. Or both. Or you could roll your own crypto on top of an established crypto.
It's not settled because F500 have more money than sense. How many contractors in IT do they have when it's clearly more efficient and better for morale to have employees in IT vs "consultants" or contractors. Yet every F500 (even F50) I've been in, are a fucking joke in IT.
So when you say F500 like it's some fucking "we know what we're doing" argument. It's more an example of idiots not knowing what the fuck they're talking about.
IT suffers from the "Emperor wearing no clothes" more than any other field I've worked in. My guess is you're partially naked and don't even know it.
You can have have a few levels of difficulty to recover with each escalation based on how likely it is that the lower level has failed. Let's say the lowest level is on a piece of paper in your pocket which you can burn and destroy by mixing ashes with water (or some electronic equivalent thereof). The next level is multi-part key which requires access to a few bank accounts and destroying even one of them makes the combined key unrecoverable. The next level... entrusting multiple parts of the key to multiple people who don't know each other with different storage schemes only known to those people (and not to you)? It goes on. But at each stage, destroying a part of the key has to make the rest of the parts useless. The next stage is having each of the or mechanisms remove it from themselves in similar ways. Each escalating level increases the cost of recovery, but is less likely to be utilized.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Print it out in a readable monospace font that differentiates between 1/I and 0/O. Droid Sans Mono modified to have a zero-dot or zero-slash is pretty good. Keep it in a safe deposit box.
When you lose lose a key, type it in twice and use a good visual differencer to make the two copies identical (and as close as possible to the printed original by using it as a guide to choose between the A/B copies). Try the key. If it fails, type in another copy and use a visual differencer to update again. Repeat until the key is good and works. It can take a few hours, but it will always work.
As with any backup, try it out before you use the method to make sure that it works for you.
I store my keyfiles in Keepass, where I can use them with hotkeys. My keypass syncs to all my devices (and my wife's devices in case I die) and I just need to know the master key to my container database which contains the keyfile to my real database, which is in my head and nonlinguistic and nowhere else. (actually it's not even in my head - it's in my fingers' muscle memory).
You can put the master and recovery instructions into a QR - but where are you going to hide that and protect it?
My wife has her own key which opens here keypass database, which has the key to my personal database.
My wife's database opens my personal, and my master database open's hers and my work databases. and yes my gaming passwords that my wife doesn't care for are in another database she doesn't care about.
How often are you going to need to scan in that paper copy? Does it really matter if it's fiddly if you are going to do it at most only one time? Scan it; if misaligned, realign. If it won't OCR, then find the questionable characters and try some different options. At worst, assuming relatively good condition for the paper, you'll spend an extra day getting your key back, and this is after a day of trying your digital copies or a week of dealing with the real problems associated with disaster recovery: food, water, shelter, medical attention, etc.
In my organization, we've switched over to using Yubikeys for handling our private key storage. Our primary use case is SSH keys for remote terminals and git repositories, but there is no reason why it couldn't be used for other secure encryption methods too.
Use personal and corporate Keypass files.
have an insanely strong corporate password that you store in your personal file as well as with 1 or more trusted users
backup your corporate keypass file on domain + cloud
I use just use google drive for cloud
The weak link is of course the personal files so just make sure you trust/train the whoever you give it to have really strong personal passwords as well.
Here is their description:
Split GPG implements a concept similar to having a smart card with your private GPG keys, except that the role of the “smart card” plays another Qubes AppVM. This way one, not-so-trusted domain, e.g. the one where Thunderbird is running, can delegate all crypto operations, such as encryption/decryption and signing to another, more trusted, network-isolated, domain. This way the compromise of your domain where Thunderbird or another client app is running – arguably a not-so-unthinkable scenario – does not allow the attacker to automatically also steal all your keys. (We should make a rather obvious comment here that the so-often-used passphrases on private keys are pretty meaningless because the attacker can easily set up a simple backdoor which would wait until the user enters the passphrase and steal the key then.)
The diagram below presents the big picture of Split GPG architecture.
https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/s...
Pull your Jazz/Super floppy/5.25"/Zip drive out of the closet, make copies, and put them in different physical (preferably geographic) areas. Security through antiquity. A software raid array of floppy drives is actually kind of funny.
QRCode just isn't secure enough... The ideal backup format would be Cauzin Softstrip.
You would also have to write the software to read/write the strips, unless you have your Apple II handy.
I presume you have your single, digital version on a USB device or other machine-readable, portable format which you keep in your possession. How big is the key? Is it less than 8000 characters? Print two copies out on acid free paper and put them in two safety deposit boxes in banks in different cities - one local, and one remote. In the local SDB, also place a digitally readable version on a USB key.
In order to lose your key, you would need to have a physical disaster which simultaneously destroys two separate physical structures beyond recovery at the same time your personal key is lost or destroyed. If your key fails or is destroyed, you have a backup key which you can copy quickly from the local SDB from which to make a spare. If that key is bad, or if the local branch is destroyed in the cataclysm while your personal key is gone, you still have a paper copy which you can enter by hand. An 8000 character key should be enterable in under 2 hours, even with careful entry. And, lets be honest, what is 2 hours - or even 4 - if you're talking about the security of your data. And, no I'm not being sarcastic - you can travel to a remote SDB 100 miles away, retrieve the key (which can be photocopied locally and then redeposited), return to your office, enter the key and decrypt your data in less than one working day. Expand that to 400 miles and it's still retrievable in a long day by car (and who hasn't worked a 16 hour IT day before) and you're looking at avoiding nearly every natural or man made disaster in modern history.
This method is slightly inconvenient, but not excessively so, and yet *very* robust in terms of privacy, security, and retrievability.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Really? How strange. And here I was under the belief that companies like Google or Facebook mine our data, government agencies (FBI, NSA, GCHQ, etc) steal our data, and hackers constantly break into every company they can to get copies of our private details.
I'm sure the countless news stories on the subject were just lies though. You're right. Nobody is interested in that stuff! Why should we bother to put a lock on our door when the burglars only come once a week?
Encode your secret keys as DNA sequences, then print them out, multiply them on a petri dish, and have them sent out for cryo storage.
They'll last a lot longer than flash media, and there will be much internal redundancy.
You could also make a 3-Way mirror'd ZFS pool of USB sticks, and set NCOPIES to like 100000, before writing the keys to disk and sending them out to storage.... repeat again for each of at least 3 offsite locations, so have at least 3 USB sticks per storage vault, and work out how many years before you need to refresh them all.
It is trivial to write a simple long password-generating algorithm that can be done entirely in the head.
No, you do not need every single character being random, there is absolutely zero difference between iam15Anusii and daj48amye3o when it comes to entropy.
That is obviously a simple example, but here it is extremely more complex: i3am1154Anusii1. Replaced would-be-spacers with digits of Pi.
"But Anonymous, that password sucks, look at how small it is!".
That is where you replace that with a sentence from your favourite / most hated quote with words exchanged for words unique to you, stupid words you made up with friends when pissing around or something when you were kids and some number unique to you used as a spacer. Throw a punctuation mark in there and you just killed a universe.
There you go, enjoy your infinitely more secure password than anything LastPass or other silly systems can afford you.
You can do this both for your passwords and keyfiles separately.
Equally, take current encryption and up the bits by 10k.
Sure, quantum computers are "5 years away" every 5 years, but they will arrive in our lifetimes in a usable form.
They are already working to some extents in experimental setups and quantum annealing is gaining even more momentum with Google, NASA and some other companies. IT WILL HAPPEN. Sooner than you think.
So if your shit got caught in a mass-hack, it will be decrypted at some point and you will be liable for all your weird tranny porn or whatever weird paranoid-inducing crap you have saved behind these methods.
As they say, "save all the things, decrypt later".
Hard drives are cheap. Flash drives are just as cheap now and can fit immense amounts of space in similar sizes of HDDs, and the largest flash memories are getting much cheaper that outpace HDD density by 10x. These agencies also have basically zero budgeting because they get any and every resources they can. It isn't all "military" spends.
One might have a system that took two strong passwords to unlock. That way even under a court order that forces you to surrender that password the files could not be opened. That second person should have a will or legal document that would send you that password should they become unable to respond. If questioned by a judge your remark should be that you have surrendered your password and are unable to do more. How many judges or prosecutors would think to ask if there is another person with a password. And if working with a lawyer the lawyer could have another party own that second password. It might be legally impossible in the US to force a lawyer to discuss his consultations with a client.
I store my private keys on an Amiga 5 1/4" Floppy Disks. Lets see how many people still own Amiga's much less own a 5 1/4" floppy drive FOR and Amiga. Oh and can read a custom non-dos disk format. :)
The Truth is a Virus!!!
Everyone has three kinds of data:
1) Data they want to keep perpetually (eg Family photos and Vidoes) and aren't particularly concerned about others seeing it. This kind of data you simply keep in three locations, eg Facebook (as images/photos), CD/DVD/BD unencrypted so it can be read in a BD player, and a Mechanical drive that you keep the originals on.
2) Data they want to keep out of the hands of the government, media and pirates, this data has to be in two locations, one mechanical and one solid state. Both ideally are encrypted with two different keys.
3) Data they want to keep access to perpetually. This is where you store your data on two NAS systems. So you take the data you want in #1 and #2 and use this as one additional copy on top of all the stuff you want access to, like purchases from iTunes, GOG, Licensed materials, Video masters, and so forth. You have one local NAS at your home location, and one at your principal work location. Software on the NAS synchronize with each other, but are otherwise not accessible by other staff/employees.
So in the end, your family pictures, porn and work materials all exist in no less than 3 places. The encrypted data exists "inside" the NAS, eg an iSCSI volume that is encrypted rather than a zip file or something. the iSCSI volume is mountable and decryption is only possible by you having the key.
Which goes back to the topic. Where do you put these keys? I'd put half the key on a key chain flash drive that I take with me, and the other half the key on a mobile phone. So both devices must be plugged in to access the encrypted data. If you lose one of these devices (say you were robbed and someone ran off with just the cell phone) you recover the key from another source kept on one of your other sources for #1 hidden in plain sight. For example a Facebook photo can have a parts of the key steographed into certain photos. So let's say you lost one or both half of your keys, you know which photos contain the key parts to regenerate the original key.
I'm using Facebook as an example, but there are other ways of doing this, like you could store the backup key in four parts, and put them on media that isn't readily obvious. For example, you could divide the key, laser print it onto QR codes and then put them in a photo album.
I decided to write down my key on a post it note. That way it's always available on my monitor, just in case.
But really, I think I can remember "password1234" without having it written down, but I figure it's best to err on the side of caution. At least that's what the professionals say.
Just store it on Github so that you have access to it whenever you need it.
You realize that the use case that having a locked door to your house helps is along the lines of "an optimistic but generally inept burglar comes around every so often and turns the doorknob of all the houses in your neighbourhood hoping they will come upon one where the door is not locked."
Does that seem that likely to you? Particularly if you live in a city, where the working assumption of everyone (including burglars) is that everyone's house door is locked.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Escrow the keys with your federal government. You'll soon be forced to do this soon, anyway,
Source: Wikipedia.
But even ordinary CDs last (mostly) for 10-20 years in my experience, see my other comment
.
Perl Programmer for hire
Check out Master Password:
https://github.com/Lyndir/MasterPassword
A single master root password that is used to derive all other passwords that you need. You can put it on an android device that isn't connected to the internet, and go from there.
Since it's stateless, it doesn't matter if the device you use is destroyed. And as long as you remember this one password, you will be able to derive all the rest.
Have gnu, will travel.
Generally when traveling use password recovery and prefer a different medium like phone, but usually email.
recover, change, don't keep it stored.
generally doesn't take long,
that's how I got into slashdot now
when your (nearly) 60 your allowed to have a random memory
Go well
If you use a backup utility other than copy+paste to an external drive or a backup script you wrote yourself (or by extension one your company wrote) it is already insecure. Data is too valuable to be treated by anyone getting a pittance for a backup utility as private. Don't even consider the cloud or network based backups outside your own intranet.
You realize that the use case that having a locked door to your house helps is along the lines of "an optimistic but generally inept burglar comes around every so often and turns the doorknob of all the houses in your neighbourhood hoping they will come upon one where the door is not locked."
Not really, no. The use case of having a locked door is to make it not trivial to break in.
Generally inept burglars are more common than many people think. A professional burglar may well make it into my house, but a random addict looking for shit to fence probably won't.
While this is not the best method, it does add complexity to mix.
Basically, do not keep a single key on your storage medium. CD-R, USB, even your HDD.
Generate thousands, hundreds of thousands, even millions of keys. Making your key, a needle in the haystack.
0000.key ~ 9999.key is easy to find, as secure as an ATM PIN. Maybe
Depends if the encryption method raises an error when the wrong key is used.
Of course you could leave some decoy encrypted data with your keys, too.
Burn it onto an EPROM, or PROM, like the cartridge games of old. Those should last a piece.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
I was a bit shocked to not see this offered by anyone... but... captain obvious chiming in... give them to a trusted friend?
try Tomb
https://www.dyne.org/software/tomb
2 x USB drives or encrypted (e.g TrueCrypt or a forked derivative like VeraCrypt, TCnext, CipherShed).
See gnuk here: http://www.fsij.org/doc-gnuk/intro.html.
Using smart cards or USB tokens such as Nitrokey are a good option too because they are supposed to be secure against physical attacks and against password brute force attacks. In fact they use PINs which restrict guesses to three-or-so tries.
In order to avoid the possibility of a string of text being unrecoverable in the future due to some minor change in the text you used versus the available copies (a potential issue with printed or online versions of even classic texts such as The Odyssey, Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliette, etc), use a specific version of the Bible. For example the King James Version of a Psalm; that text will always be the same, character for character, if you use a specific version (interpretation and language translation) of the Bible. There are other texts that could also be used, including similar non-Christian examples. The presence of a religious book has many advantages, including the likelihood that access to it will be made available under many circumstances, including imprisonment by hostile agents. It is also "normal" to own or demand access to such texts.
I have a copy of my private keys on a thumb drive sealed in plastic that I buried somewhere. I have a key combination on my system that if hit runs a wipe of the private keys on this system. I will tell you it isn't buried on my property. Good luck on finding my backup.
Encryption: Use a tool with PGP. duplicity is fine.
Decrytion: You have a usb key with the private key, protected by a strong password. If you need restore, you can copy the key where you need it.
Just use this password: m:,ksi)[gjwuFSR62zh&çx+dhkghg6V;Ijxn'||v}w~)v}JQanNY=.ASCoeE=2knq1d)7-`**l`:p|=KpYDtK&MUA^7$ print this, and use Academic Signature > Accessories > Hardened Symmetric Crypto. Make sure the cipher is "Chimera", select the file to encrypt, change the "keyword" to the password above, and send it to every possible cloud service in the planet, plus M-DISK, usb keys, dvd's, blue-rays, spining disks and every thing new that appear in the future.
the password is just right here on the paper.... and you can put it safely inside your favourite socks: remote hacker proof.