This week I read a post about the death of the Boeing whistleblower, and how Boeing might have suicided him.
I don’t care about if the rumors are true or not, however someone mentioned in the comments that in such situations one should always have a Dead Man Switch.
For those who don’t know a Dead Man Switch is basically an action TBD in case you die, like leaking documents, send messages/emails, kill a server etc . . .
The concept tickled me a bit, and I decided I want to build a similar system for myself. No, I am not in danger but I would like to send last goodbyes to friends and family. I think it would be cool concept.
How would you go and build such service?
I thinking of using a VPS to do the actions because it would be running for a while before my debit card gets cancelled.
The thing that is bugging me out is the trigger, I will not put that responsibility onto someone that’s cheating, so it would have to be something which can reliably tell I am dead and has to run regularly.
Where is what I come up with :
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Ask a country association through email if am I am dead.
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Check if I haven’t logged out on my password manager in a week. If it’s even possible.
TLDR; Give me ideas on how to build a DEAD MAN SWITCH and what triggers should I use.
I think the classic choice is a ping with a wide enough margin of error to allow for temporary incapacitation. There are a plethora of ways to do this and the main concern would probably be obfuscation of the trigger and a proof of identity. In the modern world the cheap solution I’d suggest is connecting a server with a 2FA app on your phone and having a request string/web page where you can input a token. If the server goes a few days without a correct token it triggers the death script.
I’d avoid anything that actively pings you since that traffic would be predictable and easier to snoop - potentially alerting a bad actor to the fact you have such a system setup… you also, obviously, don’t want to tell anyone you have such a system. And you definitely want some kind of rotating identity proof so that replay attacks can’t indefinitely delay the script trigger - random ass 2FA apps might be too easy to identify in this regard but it’s so trivial and accessible to implement that I think it’s a reasonable choice.
I’ve actually given this a lot of thought over the years. The biggest issue for me is all my AWS services that no one in my family knows about.
So the idea would be to, at minimum, let my family know what services are being used.
Unfortunately there isn’t a turn-key solution. I’ve seen a number of well-meaning solutions and some that are quite novel but they all suffer from the same problems: how do you deal with false positives and how do you verify your deadness.
I imagine that the problem is similar to the Yellowstone trash can problem, in that any solution to mitigate one will make it harder on the other.
The best solution I’ve found is to have a two-person solution, similar to launching a nuke. You have automation that tests if you are active that emails a close friend or relative to verify you are indeed dead.
Ideally there would be more than one person on this list a confirmation from two people would kick off all of the automations you code.
mmm I didn’t want to bring anyone into this, but I if I manage someone techy I know to be Dead Man Switch buddies, honestly it would be a good measure.
They don’t need to be a techie. Just someone who can click a button.
I am remembering Julian Assuage has/had a payload that was distributed via BitTorrent. The file was encrypted with a private key and his public key was posted either as a file in the package or on the site where the magnet file was downloaded.
Before he was arrested, he encouraged everyone to download the file and sit on it and to keep seeding it. He said in the event of his untimely death, the password would be released for everyone to decrypt.
That would be another option but you sort of need the notoriety to make this work.
Leave instructions in your will for your executor to carry out after you are gone. The high tech stuff is not needed. Several times on forums or in other places, someone passes away and word gets around. In some cases the member’s widow will log in to relay the news and maybe share some memories of the deceased. That means they must have been given the account password for such purposes.
Just have a requirement that you sign into the system every N hours and respond to a simple challenge. Once you stop doing that, it auto-fires when the time has run out.
There could be reasons other than death preventing you from accessing the system to update this though. Stranded somewhere, power outage, unexpectedly arrested and incarcerated, medical emergency, etc.
These are all situations that you would want to alert your loved ones though. And the power outage one will probably be solved faster than your switch hopefully.
Yes, this is what I think of when I think of a “dead man’s switch”. It relates to the concept of a physical device that deactivates or activates if you let go of a switch, like a light saber for example.
I think an interval of weeks would be more convenient than hours to avoid false positives. But I think Patrick Stewart’s character did daily check-ins in the movie Safe House. The dead man’s switch was actually the central plot point in that movie.
