What deadkey.net is

The problem it solves

Most people who manage important digital assets — a password manager, an encrypted family photo archive, business credentials, a cryptocurrency wallet — face the same awkward gap: they want a specific person to be able to reach those assets if something happens to them, but they don't want to hand over passwords today, while everything is still fine. Writing a password on paper and locking it in a drawer works until you change the password. Telling someone verbally works until you forget you told them, or they forget what you said.

deadkey.net gives a trusted person — someone you trust to access your information if you are incapacitated or pass away — a way to reach what you left behind, without you giving them anything usable in advance. They hold a piece of paper. It becomes useful only if you actually become unreachable, and only after a 10-day window that gives you a chance to stop it.

Who it's for

Anyone who manages something they'd want a specific person to access if they were incapacitated or died. You do not need to be elderly or ill. Many people set this up the same way they write a will: as a practical precaution, done once and then set aside.

How it works, in plain terms

At setup, you protect a secret you already have — a PIN, a code, or a password — by encoding it as coordinates into a random codebook. Each digit or character in your secret gets matched to a position in the codebook; those positions are what deadkey.net stores, encrypted. The codebook itself is printed and given only to your trusted person, on a Recovery Sheet, along with a lookup email and an 8-character code.

If your trusted person ever needs to act, they enter that email and code at /trigger, which starts a 10-day countdown. You're notified immediately, with a one-click way to cancel if you're safe. If you don't cancel in time, the site emails your trusted person the coordinates, and they look each one up in their codebook, by hand, to read off your secret.

Our server only ever holds the coordinates, which reveal nothing but length. Your trusted person only ever holds the codebook, which reveals nothing without the coordinates. Only the two together reveal the secret — and the only place that ever happens is inside your trusted person's own browser, at the moment of release.

If you'd rather see this end-to-end before reading further, there's an interactive walkthrough that illustrates the whole process, including a small worked example of a codebook lookup. For the full technical design behind these claims, see the security model.

Where to go next

Watch the interactive demo, read the FAQ for practical questions, or read the full security model for the technical details.