Social Account Recovery

A safety net to regain lost access

Losing access to your wallet can be a frustrating and stressful experience. Fortunately, innovative solutions like Social Account Recovery offer a safety net to regain control of your accounts and the underlying assets.

What is a Social Account Recovery System and why is it important?

A Social Account Recovery System is a designated security measure that allows authorized individuals (guardians) to assist users in regaining access to their accounts in case a user loses access to their smart account. This can happen:

• If the user uninstalls the dapp from her phone, which indirectly deletes any passkey stored locally on the device.

• Delete the stored passkeys from the browser storage.

The social aspect of the account recovery system also enhances security by eliminating a single point of failure i.e. access to email or cloud backup. It also reduces dependencies on centralized services. Moreover, dapp builders can also customize the recovery system by requiring specific numbers of guardian approvals or offering different verification methods.

How it works?

1. Guardian Setup: Users designate trusted individuals as guardians during account creation or through specific account settings.

2. Lost Access: If a user loses access to their account, they can initiate an account recovery process by asking an assigned guardian to create an account recovery request.

3. Guardian Signatures: Upon successful creation of the account recovery request, all account guardians will be able to access the recovery request from their respective Guardian portal.

4. Guardian Approval: Guardians receive the request and have the option to approve or deny the account recovery.

5. Account Recovery: Once approved by the majority of the account guardians, a new embedded wallet should be created on the client side and its public address should be sent to the AccountRecovery contract. This new wallet address is made the new owner of the smart contract holding all the user's assets, resulting in the user regaining control!

Access to the user's assets can be regained because the assets are held in a smart contract instead of a software wallet.

Social Account Recovery Systems:

• eliminates the single point of failure,

• provides customization of recovery logic

therefore providing a more reliable, secure, and customizable wallet experience.

Get started with integrating Social Account Recovery.

💡Architecture