After reading about the “suicide” of yet another whistleblower, it got me thinking.
When working at large enough company, it’s entirely possible that at some point you will get across some information the company does not want to be made public, but your ethics mandate you blow the whistle. So, I was wondering if I were in that position how I would approach creating a dead man’s switch in order to protect myself.
From wikipedia:
A dead man’s switch is a switch that is designed to be activated or deactivated if the human operator becomes incapacitated, such as through death, loss of consciousness, or being bodily removed from control. Originally applied to switches on a vehicle or machine, it has since come to be used to describe other intangible uses, as in computer software.
In this context, a dead man’s switch would trigger the release of information. Some additional requirements could include:
- No single point of failure. (aka a usb can be stolen, your family can be killed, etc)
- Make the existence of the switch public. (aka make sure people know of your mutually assured destruction)
- Secrets should be safe until you die, disappear, or otherwise choose to make them public.
Anyway, how would you go about it?
That’s an optimization for just having the automated email send the secret directly.
depending on the size of the secret, it helps to have people download it ahead of time.
Also, it acts as a time stamp proving that you knew the secret at a certain time if that’s useful.
Right, that’s what i mean by optimization. It’s accomplishing the same goal, but amortizes the transfer over more time, saving bandwidth.
The timestamp feature could also be accomplished by publicly posting a small hash of the data ahead of time, but similarly bandwidth can be optimized by distributing the encrypted blob ahead of time.