Blog

Google's BeyondCorp paper introduced zero trust to enterprise security in 2014. The same framework — identity over location, authentication as perimeter, least privilege, assume breach — ports directly to personal life and produces a better result than the ad-hoc alternative.

Bruce Schneier, Edward Snowden, and Cory Doctorow have spent careers writing about personal threat modeling against state surveillance and platform power. Their principles apply more cleanly to digital estate planning than most estate-planning advice does. A walk-through.

Microsoft's STRIDE framework was built for application security. It works just as well on personal OPSEC and estate planning — spoofing your identity, tampering with beneficiary designations, denial of service on your own life. A walk-through.

I launched Killswitch with a bug bounty program because a security product seems obligated to have one. I shut it down three months later. Here's what a solo founder learns from running one in 2026.

How the Social Security Death Master File works, why banks, the IRS, and credit bureaus all find out at different speeds, and why the gap between death and notification is the most exploited window in American identity fraud.

A plain-English walkthrough of Shamir's Secret Sharing — the polynomial trick, where it works in production, and the brutal failure modes that make it the wrong tool for most family inheritance plans.

From Westinghouse's 1872 train brake to the Soviet Dead Hand system to WikiLeaks insurance files to modern crypto inheritance — the long, strange history of the switch that fires when you stop showing up.

James Howells threw the wrong hard drive in a landfill. Stefan Thomas has two password attempts left on $250M of Bitcoin. Matthew Mellon died on $1B of XRP nobody could find. A look at the most expensive mistakes in cryptocurrency — and the simple precautions that would have prevented every one.

Every account you own is only as secure as its recovery flow. "Forgot password" is, by design, a feature that lets someone who isn't you take over your account if they can convince the system they're you. A look at why recovery is the real security perimeter — and what better recovery would look like.

The threat model, the wrapped master key architecture, the per-file content keys, the per-share keys, and the trigger pipeline — a transparent walkthrough of Killswitch's original zero-knowledge design, preserved as history. We retired this architecture in 2026.