Best practices for family emergency planning

joangoddard

I have been using 1Password for a couple of months now, and I want to use it as part of my family's planning for emergencies. I've read numerous posts on this forum and elsewhere and have tried to apply them to our situation. I'd like to get your feedback about how to organize our vaults to meet our goals. Here is the situation:

Wife, Husband, Daughter - all have Macs with OS X Yosemite 10.10.3, 1Password 5.3 purchased from the App store, also some iPads and iPhones with iOS 8.4, 1Password 5.4.3 with Pro Features

We're synching with Dropbox (we each have our own account) and each of us has the following vaults/keychains:

/Primary/1Password.agilekeychain

• Each of us has our own Primary vault
  /Family/Family.agilekeychain

• We have one vault with info that we share today

Our requirements/goals:
1. Each of us has his/her own vault to use on a day-to-day basis; currently this is our Primary vault.
2. In an emergency, we want to be able to access the info that is now in each other's Primary vaults.
3. My husband and I are OK with sharing our vaults/passwords with each other now.
4. Our daughter is able to access our vaults only if both of us are unable to act on our own behalf.
5. We have access to our daughter's vault only if she is unable to act on her own behalf.

Problems with our current setup:
1. All the primary vaults have the same path/name which would be hard to differentiate in the Dropbox folder.
2. Sharing a primary vault isn't recommended because the vault contains the encryption keys to the secondary vaults.

I believe we can meet our goals and get around these problems by:
1. Moving everything from our Primary vaults to secondary vaults that have names and folders that uniquely identify them.
2. Sharing the new folders with each other.
3. Making the passwords available through a trusted party.

Here is the vault setup:

Each person (Wife, Husband, and Daughter) has
/Family/Family.agilekeychain

• Same as today

/Primary/1Password.agilekeychain

• Contains no info except passwords to secondary vaults
• No sharing

Wife also has
/Wife/Wife.agilekeychain

• Contains info that is currently in her Primary vault
• Folder shared with Husband, Daughter
• Password shared with Husband
• Password available to Daughter through trusted party in case of emergency

Husband also has
/Husband/Husband.agilekeychain

• Contains info that is currently in his Primary vault
• Folder shared with Wife, Daughter
• Password shared with Wife
• Password available to Daughter through trusted party in case of emergency

Daughter also has
/Daughter/Daughter.agilekeychain

• Contains info that is currently in her Primary vault
• Folder shared with Wife, Husband
• Password available to Wife/Husband through trusted party in case of emergency

Any thoughts?

Thanks!

---

1Password Version: 5.3
Extension Version: Not Provided
OS Version: OS X Yosemite 10.10.3
Sync Type: Dropbox
Referrer: forum-search:Best practices for family emergency planning

littlebobbytables

Hi @joangoddard,

The general idea seems solid to me but I think we can simplify a little. Regardless, there will be a bit of faffing about with the Agile Keychains but thankfully this will be a one-off task.

You are already sharing the Family folder I believe that contains the Family.agilekeychain. What I think would work is you create three new folders in that Family folder, one for each of you. As Family is being shared they are shared automatically.

Then you have each person disable synchronisation of their current Primary vault, deleting their original 1Password.agilekeychain in the process and then re-enable it, pointing 1Password to their newly created specific folder. Your folder layout would then look something like:

/Family
/Family/Daughter/1Password.agilekeychain
/Family/Husband/1Password.agilekeychain
/Family/Wife/1Password.agilekeychain 
/Family/Family.agilekeychain

So each Primary vault is separated and easy to distinguish based on the folder structure and it makes use of your currently shared folder. You and your wife can easily access each other's vault if you want (1Password doesn't care if you're syncing a primary and secondary vault to two different 1Password.agilekeychain files) and as long as your trusted party is trustworthy you can leave the three Master Passwords with them. Given what a Master Password represents you will want somebody very trustworthy like a lawyer or safety deposit box or combination of the two - whatever works for wherever you are based.

The benefit of this approach is you still each have a primary vault that is unique to you and unlocks just your vaults. The key part here you see is we only locally store secondary vault encryption keys in the primary vault - the Agile Keychains don't contain this information as we don't make any assumptions about who may or may not also have access to any given vault.

Does that help at all? If you do have questions please do ask! :smile:

joangoddard

Yes, that definitely helps. I like the idea of putting all the shared vaults in the Family folder.

I'm a little wary about sharing the Primary vaults, though, based on Megan's January 2014 comment here. @megan, can you weigh in?

On the trustworthy issue, here is what we've come up with: We'll give the person who may need the password someday the FIRST half of the password. We'll give the SECOND half to another trusted family member with instructions to share it only in an emergency. Then no one has the whole password except us. We're still taking the risk that these two people could get together for nefarious purposes, but we think that's unlikely.

Thanks,
Joan

AGAlumB

I'm a little wary about sharing the Primary vaults, though, based on Megan's January 2014 comment here. @megan, can you weigh in?

@joangoddard: I reviewed Megans comments there in the thread, and I'm not suite sure what exactly you're referring to. Can you tell me what it is exactly that makes you wary? Ultimately the only difference between a Primary and Secondary vault in 1Password for Mac is that the Secondary is unlocked along with the Primary.

On the trustworthy issue, here is what we've come up with: We'll give the person who may need the password someday the FIRST half of the password. We'll give the SECOND half to another trusted family member with instructions to share it only in an emergency. Then no one has the whole password except us. We're still taking the risk that these two people could get together for nefarious purposes, but we think that's unlikely.

I like this idea. Clever. I would say that if these two people don't know they each have half of the password the other has it's even better. Just give them each their half, and maybe put the instructions on what to do with it in a will or something. Just a thought.

Definitely let us know if you can shed some light on your sharing conundrum though, and we'll be happy to help! :)

Megan

Hi @joangoddard ,

I'm so glad to hear that you've been looking through our forums to find the answers that you need, but I'm sorry that my earlier posts have confused you. I'll do what I can to clarify this whole mess.

The first thing to note is that the post you mention is from early in 2014. At that time, 1Password 4 for Mac had just been released with the brand new multiple vaults feature ... and 1Password 4 for iOS did not yet have the ability to access multiple vaults. A big part of the concern with sharing the primary vaults is that there would be more than one file named "1Password.agilekeychain" sitting in a user's Dropbox. Before 1Password 4 for iOS had the multiple vaults feature, when it went looking in Dropbox for a file to sync to, it would be looking for a 1Password.agilekeychain file. If it found more than one ... or found the 'wrong' one first, it could end up merging the contents of the vaults. Which is just messy.

Once we implemented multiple vault support in iOS, the issue got slightly less messy. There is still the concern of having multiple 1Password.agilekeychain files in Dropbox, but this can be worked around by ensuring that each 1Password.agilekeychain file is in a clearly named subfolder, and simply being cautious when selecting the sync file.

As we've continued to develop 1Password, we've made improvements to how multiple vaults are handled, in part to take this type of use case into account. On iOS, we've added a warning if the vault that you are attempting to sync to is significantly different than the current vault so that it is less likely that two different 1Password.agilekeychain files will be accidentally merged.

As a general rule, we do recommend that your primary vault holds your personal unshared information and that all shared information lives in a secondary vault. And it sounds like this is the set-up that you have for your vaults already: you each have your primary vault, and all shared information is in your family vault.

Since we're talking about 'sharing' the primary vault primarily for the purposes of being prepared for an emergency, I wouldn't be concerned here. If you're using the folder structure described by Little Bobby above, it's simply a matter of paying attention to the full path of the 1Password.agilekeychain file (and making sure you select the correct one) if you ever need to reset sync.

I hope this helps to clear things up, but we're happy to continue the discussion if you have any further questions.

joangoddard

OK, thanks for the clarification, @megan. And thanks to all of you for such great support!

littlebobbytables

We're all glad we could help @joangoddard :smile:

Hopefully we can impress just as well the next time you have questions!

joangoddard

OK, here's another chance to impress me: If we share our Primary vaults, and the emergency situation occurs, won't the "survivor" be able to sync only to his/her Primary vault OR the other person's Primary vault, but not both at once (because the vaults have the same name)? But, if we share secondary vaults with all the info that is typically in a Primary vault, and we name those vaults Wife, Husband, and Daughter, then the "survivor" would be able to sync to all of them, right?

littlebobbytables

Hi @joangoddard,

This might be a bit easier with a table if the forums supported that but we'll try and give it a go.

Husband's Mac

• Primary vault syncs to /Family/Husband/1Password.agilekeychain
• Secondary vault titled Wife syncs to /Family/Wife/1Password.agilekeychain

Wife's Mac

• Primary vault syncs to /Family/Wife/1Password.agilekeychain
• Secondary vault titled Husband syncs to /Family/Husband/1Password.agilekeychain

Then if you ever needed to you could add another secondary vault titled Daughter and have that sync to /Family/Daughter/1Password.agilekeychain.

Essentially /Family/Husband/1Password.agilekeychain is not equal to /Family/Wife/1Password.agilekeychain as far as 1Password is concerned so both you and your husband can have your own primary vault syncing to the correct Agile Keychain in Dropbox but then you can both have a secondary vault which is connected to the Agile Keychain for your spouse's Agile Keychain. Now you and I both know each of those 1Password.agilekeychains are the primary vaults for specific persons in your family unit but to 1Password, as long as the Universally Unique ID (UUID) for the vault you're trying to add isn't one it is already aware of then it doesn't care if you're trying to add a secondary vault that happens to share the filename with an existing sync container.

Each time I've said add a vault here all I really mean is double click on the correct Agile Keychain and 1Password will talk about creating a new vault and what it really means is create a new local vault based on this Agile Keychain.

Please, please do say if that makes sense or not to you as I've re-written it a couple of times now to try and get it right but I'm still not convinced as to its readability.

joangoddard

OK, I get it AND I'm impressed again. Your explanation is very clear. I was thinking that the vault name had to be the same as the first segment of the keychain. But now I see that's not the case. We'll go with exactly what you recommended.

littlebobbytables

Hi @joangoddard,

Two for two - I'm definitely notching this up as a win :tongue: Streaks are only impressive as they continue so if you have any other questions let us know :smile: