Vault Recovery

Overview

Recovery may use backup keys, threshold shares, guardians, hardware replacements, provider procedures, contract recovery modules, or migration to a new vault. The process should restore both legitimate access and the controls surrounding that access.

A recovery path is also an attack path. Weak identity checks, colluding guardians, exposed shares, dormant administrators, or provider override can defeat normal security. Recovery may restore a key but not current policies, records, integrations, or access to every dependent account.

Organizations should document triggers, authorized participants, evidence, quorum, locations, communications, and post-recovery verification. Procedures need realistic testing without exposing production secrets. Suspected compromise should lead to new authority and asset migration rather than reuse of recovered material. After recovery, permissions, balances, transactions, backups, dependencies, and accounting must be reconciled and reviewed.

The scope of Vault 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.

Vault Recovery differs from ordinary retry or customer support because it restores authority after a control failure. For example, reinstalling an application is not successful recovery until the correct accounts, networks, balances, policies, and transaction history are reproduced and compromised authority can no longer act.

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