LegacyVault: A Secure Web-Based Digital Will Management System with Multi-Party Verification and Behavioral Monitoring
The increasing digitization of personal and legal records has created demand for secure platforms that can store sensitive testamentary documents and manage their transfer after an owner's death or prolonged incapacity. Existing consumer tools, such as platform-specific legacy-contact features, and academic proposals such as blockchain-based inheritance systems, address parts of this problem but not the combination of behavioral monitoring, inactivity-triggered access, and distributed, multi-party authorization within a single lightweight system. This paper presents LegacyVault, a web-based digital will management system that integrates authentication with password hashing, AES document encryption, rule-based behavioral risk scoring, inactivity detection, a multi-party verification mechanism requiring at least two independent approvals for emergency access, and comprehensive audit logging. The system was developed using a prototyping methodology and evaluated through functional, usability, and security testing on a working prototype. Test results show that authentication, document encryption, trusted-contact assignment, inactivity detection, and audit logging modules operated as designed, with average operation response times between 1.2 and 7.0 seconds. We discuss how these results compare with existing platform-specific and academic approaches, note the limitations of the small-scale prototype evaluation, and outline directions for scaling the system toward real-world deployment.