Social Recovery

Overview

A wallet owner selects guardians who can authorize a replacement key or recovery action when normal access is lost. The threshold may be enforced by a smart contract, service, or cryptographic scheme. Guardians typically should not control daily spending.

The process faces collusion, coercion, account takeover, unavailable guardians, and fraudulent recovery claims. Public guardian relationships can reveal personal networks. Provider or contract administrators may also influence recovery outside the visible guardian set.

Designers should define quorum, delay, owner notifications, guardian replacement, cancellation, and emergency conditions. Guardians need a reliable way to verify the claimant and new key without receiving seed phrases. Users should test recovery and review the set periodically. After a recovery, compromised or obsolete guardian authority should be replaced.

Evidence for Social 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 Social Recovery, sensitive recovery material must not appear in the incident record.

For Social Recovery, important risks include fraudulent recovery requests, guardian collusion, unavailable shares, outdated backups, compromised cloud accounts, missing derivation metadata, untested procedures, and simultaneous loss of primary and backup systems.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

The scope of Social 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.