security and privacy considerations in digital death
Death is an uncomfortable subject for many people, and digital systems are rarely designed to deal with this event. In particular, the wide array of existing digital authentication infrastructure rarely deals with gracefully retiring credentials in a uniform fashion. This research paper highlights an emerging paradigm: gracefully dealing with expired digital identities in a secure, privacy-preserving fashion. It examines the confluence of modern browser technology, cloud services, and human factors involved in managing a person's digital footprint while they live and retiring it when they die. We contemplate a potential approach to dealing with credentials after death by using cloud computing. We consider the reasons that such an approach may actually provide an opportunity for enhancing authentication security by frustrating identity stealing attacks. We note that this paper is not aimed at trivializing the real grief and loss that people feel, but rather an attempt to understand how security and privacy concerns are shaped by the end of life, with the ultimate goal of easing this transition for friends and family.
death digital end-of-life cloud identity management identity containers