Social Key Recovery
- in progress
With our (Social-) Key Recovery App for iOS and Android smartphones we aim for a convenient and secure recovery solution for secrets. While not bound to seeds or private keys, we believe that cryptocurrency owners and blockchain users are a natural fit for such a solution.
(Social-) Key Recovery Solution for secrets
We use the Shamir Secret Sharing Scheme to create multiple shards from a secret. The secret cannot be derived from any one shard and a predefined number out of all shards are required to rebuild the secret. The shards can be distributed by the user to multiple devices, friends or services such as Dropbox, Google Drive, etc.
We plan on working together with several institutions to provide a custody solution for shards.While shared in a network of friends, for recovery all that is needed is to pair again with the predefined number of friends that is required to rebuild the secret and recovery can be initiated securely over a dedicated peer to peer connection.
Recovery of secrets stored on lost or stolen devices
Users of cryptocurrency wallets, especially those using smartphone wallets may need to backup their seeds or private keys. Most new users of cryptocurrencies and blockchain in general are not accustomed to watch out for their secrets. This is a high risk, since without their keys they lose access to their account and wealth on a blockchain. This means if the smartphone is lost, stolen or the wallet app uninstalled, access is most certainly lost forever. While there exist a wide range of backup solutions such as paper- and hardware wallets, most solutions are not that convenient for the end-user. With our (social-) key recovery solution we aim to offer a secure and convenient backup solution for secrets and private keys.
Generalized backup solution for secrets
We want to offer an app that is open source, thoroughly audited and easily integratable for other services such as crypto wallets. So users can manage and recover all their secrets in one place.
We plan on working together with institutions to offer custody services for shards as well as to integrate with services such as dropbox and google drive.
Our recovery solution will be independent from trust to a single party or entity and flexible enough to support decentralized communication protocols such as Ethereum Whisper.
Use Case
Recover secrets previously shared with friends on a new phone
Let’s assume Alice has a secret which secures something of value (cryptocurrencies would be a good use case here).
She worries about losing this secret and as a consequence, losing access to her assets. Now she might be inclined to back up her secret with people she trusts. Hence, she uses an app for Social Key Recovery which splits her secret into five parts and distributes those to people she is close to. Furthermore, she specifies that three of the five parts are necessary to recompute her secret. One day Alice loses her phone and with it her secret. At this point, she can contact three of the five people who earlier received a part of her secret. With the help of these people, she can restore her secret. Thus Alice regains access to her assets on the new phone.
Ready to start?
Check out our Low Fidelity-Prototype.
Click trough different use cases and have a look at our the first features.