If you accidentally chose the wrong date, you at least only locked yourself out for a maximum of 1 year, and not say, 100 or 1000 years, which is identical to deletion.
The point of this is, that it cannot be canceled. Once the door shuts, you can’t open it, until the expiration date arrives.
The usecase is for example interesting for people owning Bitcoin.
You might have a signing device like a Trezor. You make a backup of the recovery seed by storing two paper copies of the 24 words in two secure locations. Let’s say your bank safe deposit box and your aunts house.
But you don’t want your aunt or anybody visiting her to have access to the funds, so you add a passphrase, which is an arbitrary string being a 25th word.
You might want to store this passphrase in a time-locked bitwarden entry, for at least two reasons:
To keep yourself from panic selling. This might be very important for tax purposes, to really sit out at least 1 year.
To mitigate against physical attacks. If someone gets a hold of the seed, then you are still physically incapable of cooperating with the attacker. Similar to the function of multi-signature arrangements like https://keys.casa offer.
If someone got access to your vault you could still hide some things from that person by simply extending the time lock on a regular basis; unless you cannot do that anymore.
So you share login credentials with someone you trust and as long as you’re alive, you extend the lock? I guess that would work as a dead man switch. But so would having a dedicated regular entry where you periodically write the latest lottery numbers or bitcoin block hashes into. Something you couldn’t have known in advance.
But: A dead man switch functionality would be cool. I’m going to search the forums later and if I don’t find anything, I’ll post something like this (unless you do it first ;)):
Dead Man Switch:
When nobody logged into the BitWarden account for n days, this secondary password can be used to login.
This 100%, life is so complicated nowadays. I need something to allow family members to access all of my assets, bank account, crypto and other details that will make my passing a bit easier for them. I don’t want to write it down or give anyone the responsibility to hold this information in case something goes wrong.
I’d have it expire every year on my Birthday. Easy for me and my family to remember.
upvoted. my angle on this is spending to much time on social media/ money on shopping. time-lockinf entries would provide means of controlling said behaviour without having to give up on it completely.
This would be my use case for this feature. I am currently using a website called send recurring to email myself my password once a month, but if send recurring ever failed, I would be locked out permanently. A timed locked on certain bitwarden entries seems much more dependable.
Sidenote: I changed the title from “Time-Lock for entries” to “Time-Lock for entries (make vault items inaccessible for a configurable time)” to make it a bit more obvious what’s meant.
