Assuming they were using threshold cryptography, they could have easily configured some redundancy into the system, e.g. by requiring 3 out of 5 people to decrypt it instead of 3 of 3.
It's easy to blame the one guy for losing the key, but he could have gotten hit by a bus or lost the hard drive in a house fire and they would have been equally as screwed. This is more of a system design failure than a PEBKAC failure.
Conspiracy time: Trustee #3 "lost" their key because polling suggested that they wouldn't like the results.
I have no reason to believe that's actually the case, but it's interesting that the org uses a 3 key system to prevent collusion between trustees, but didn't think about how this might enable lone-trustee sabotage.
I've heard of secret ballots, but this is ridiculous!
Skill issue.
In other news the owner of a vault whose key he threw away cannot access the contents.
It would be way worse if they somehow were able to decrypt the votes anyways without the key. Whether that be by retrieving the key from a backup or a flaw in the system. Because that would defeat the whole purpose.
All in all the technology they use is very interesting technically, but this event really demonstrates the tradeoff between security and convenience. Imagine if that was the election for a country... Oof
Obligatory archive.is link. NYT thinks I'm a robot :'). Good thing real robots still work tho
a manager put all his passwords in a file then set a password to open it. forgot it. made him a new account. zip file iirc
that's why I'm hesitant to host vaultwarden myself as opposed to pay to use bitwarden
I guess that trustee won't be getting voted into any important positions in the re-run!
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