Current account recovery best practices?
Current account recovery best practices?
Hi all,
Need to pick your brains for a bit regarding best practices for handling of account recovery issues while traveling.
Premise would be that my phone gets lost or stolen, and I may not have easy access to my laptop either, and being in a foreign country I couldn't easily get a copy of the original SIM to restore via OTP.
Consequently, I also don't really love the idea of using some password manager with a master password and no F2A.
Under those circumstances, what would you consider the best way forward to ensure accessibility without crippling myself in the process?
The only thing I can come up with is a random subdomain on one of my domains, with random username and random password, where I store an encrypted container containing txt-files. Maybe even further obscured with a random cypher (all numbers / letters shifted x positions to the right or something).
But there's gotta be other use-cases out there, so I was wondering what you are using?
Ideally something that doesn't involve another person.
Thanks!
I use a very simple “hashing” algorithm that I can do mentally. If I want to log into a service, I “hash” its name, and that’s my password.
Every service I use has a different password, and I don’t have to remember any of them. I have no keyvault that can be stolen.
MFA is still an issue. You’ll need your recovery codes to be accessible, but encrypted.
This is pretty clever actually
Well that’s kinda the point. Missing your factors is supposed to make it harder.
So — account recovery code written out, that doesn’t say it is for your account?
E.g. Apple allows it as a backup to your Apple ID should you get locked out.
Depends on the syy
Yes exactly, but I still need to be able to access it myself.
Writing the codes out is one thing, but taking a paper with me on international trips actually increases the risk of it getting lost, damaged or stolen as well; and if someone was to figure out what they are for, that could even increase the potential risk. Hence my question what other people are doing :-)
I have a backdoor into my home vpn using a series of usernames, passwords, and long obfuscated http paths/subdomains.
In an absolute emergency, I can traverse that maze, retrieve a key+config to connect to openVPN, then reach my vaultwarden vault. No 2fa on that vault as it's not accessible from WAN. (though technically I could add 2fa and still be able to disable just the 2fa from vaultwardens admin console in a pinch)
Do you have all the paths, usernames and passwords committed to memory? My biggest fear is making it so secure that I don't remember it myself, since I'll effectively never use it until the emergency case occurs.
Yeah. They're all human readable but non-obvious instead of random strings. Stuff that's easy to remember but difficult to guess. You've just got to avoid typical patterns like 'randomwords526!!' or 'p00rex@mpl3'.
I do like to exercise that memory now and again, testing that I remember and that everything's functioning as it should. Just in case, theres instructions on paper in a safe place.
Being four separate item's minimum: subdomain, path, username, and password, none of which are published anywhere ofc; makes it pretty secure. The openVPN config/key needs a password as well, so 5 items.