Recovery Guardian

Overview

Guardians may approve replacement of a lost signer, contribute a threshold share, validate an identity claim, or trigger a smart-contract recovery process. They normally should not possess unilateral everyday spending authority.

Trust remains necessary even when several guardians are required. Collusion, coercion, compromise, unavailability, or social engineering can enable takeover or block legitimate recovery. Publicly identifying guardians can also expose them to targeted pressure. Contract upgrades or administrators may override the visible guardian threshold.

Wallet owners should choose independent guardians, explain duties, protect privacy, and define quorum, delay, notification, replacement, and emergency rules. Guardians need a way to verify the owner and proposed new authority without receiving seed phrases. Periodic checks should confirm availability. Recovery events should be logged and followed by review of the guardian set.

The scope of Recovery Guardian should identify the protected wallet, key, account, service, or business process; the triggering failure; who may declare the incident; which identity and entitlement evidence is required; and the recovery point and recovery time objectives that govern restoration.

For Recovery Guardian, important risks include fraudulent recovery requests, guardian collusion, unavailable shares, outdated backups, compromised cloud accounts, missing derivation metadata, untested procedures, and simultaneous loss of primary and backup systems. For Recovery Guardian, independent storage and periodic exercises reduce correlated failure but introduce their own custody obligations.

A controlled Recovery Guardian process moves through detection, containment, claimant verification, approval, restoration, validation, credential or guardian replacement, reconciliation, and closure. For Recovery Guardian, emergency access should be time-limited and should not silently weaken the authorization policy used during normal operation.