Social Recovery Guardian

Overview

The guardian can be a person, device, institution, or separately controlled account. In threshold designs, several guardians must cooperate to replace a signer or activate a recovery process. A guardian normally cannot spend wallet assets alone.

Guardians can be phished, coerced, compromised, or unavailable. They may approve a fraudulent request if they cannot verify the owner independently. A guardian’s relationship to the owner can also expose privacy and personal-security risks.

Wallets should provide clear guardian duties, secure individual authentication, transaction-independent recovery approval, and notifications to the owner and other guardians. Owners should choose independent participants and define quorum, waiting period, replacement, and cancellation. Periodic reviews should confirm contact and account status. Guardians must never request or receive the owner’s seed phrase.

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Social Recovery Guardian, important risks include fraudulent recovery requests, guardian collusion, unavailable shares, outdated backups, compromised cloud accounts, missing derivation metadata, untested procedures, and simultaneous loss of primary and backup systems.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

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