Recovery

Overview

Recovery may involve restoring backups, replacing devices, combining shares, activating guardians, rotating credentials, reconstructing records, or moving assets to safe control. The required actions depend on whether the problem affects availability, integrity, confidentiality, or legal access.

Restoring an application is not sufficient if balances, keys, policies, derivation data, or pending transactions remain incorrect. An emergency shortcut can also expose authority or repeat the incident. Some blockchain transfers and lost secrets are technically unrecoverable without an existing alternate path.

A recovery design needs defined triggers, owners, priorities, evidence, approved tools, communication, validation, and closure criteria. Exercises should test realistic failures. After recovery, teams should reconcile state, revoke obsolete access, investigate root cause, and document remaining risk. Success means trusted control and records, not merely service availability.

Evidence for Recovery should preserve incident time, affected identifiers, last known state, claimant and approver checks, backup or share version, actions performed, credentials revoked, assets verified, discrepancies found, and final owner acceptance. For Recovery, sensitive recovery material must not appear in the incident record.

For Recovery, important risks include fraudulent recovery requests, guardian collusion, unavailable shares, outdated backups, compromised cloud accounts, missing derivation metadata, untested procedures, and simultaneous loss of primary and backup systems.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

The scope of Recovery 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.