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Account Recovery Process

COMING SOON

Salt will provide an open-source process that lets organisation owners recover access to their Salt-managed digital assets if Salt's hosted services become unavailable. It will be designed to be usable by operators without deep technical expertise, while remaining completely independent of Salt's infrastructure.

The recovery process:

  • operates entirely self-contained once the required information has been provided
  • does not communicate with the Salt backend
  • uses only publicly available blockchain data plus cryptographic material you supply
  • can be independently verified because it is open source

The recovery process is a disaster-recovery mechanism. Its purpose is to recover assets from Salt-managed accounts so they can be transferred elsewhere. This is not for managing Salt Accounts day-to-day.

Loss of Robo Guardians​

You don't need to rebuild a lost Robo Guardian container. A Robo Guardian container is provisioned once, with a single-use setup code. When recovering, a decommissioned or lost host is not re-created.

If you lose access to your Robo Guardians and have the wallet-seed backup, use the recovery process to move the account's funds to a new wallet. See Flow 1. A host whose state is still intact can simply be restarted or reconnected.

If you lose access to your Robo Guardians and do not have the wallet-seed backup, you will need the private keys for all non-Robo Guardian account signers. See Flow 2.

Recovery flows​

There will be two independent recovery methods available.

Flow 1: Owner EOA + Robo Guardian wallet-seed backup​

Requires:

  • the owner's EOA private key
  • the encrypted Robo Guardian wallet-seed backup

The encrypted Robo Guardian wallet-seed backup is available from each organisation's Salt profile. Because the recovery process operates independently of Salt, organisations may also wish to store a copy of the encrypted Robo Guardian wallet-seed backup outside of Salt as part of their disaster-recovery procedures.

The owner imports both pieces into the tool, which then recovers the required cryptographic material.

Flow 2: All user EOAs​

This recovery pathway will need to be done for each account in a Salt Organisation. It does not require the Robo Guardian wallet-seed backup.

Instead, gather the private keys for all of the account's signers except the Robo Guardians.

The tool uses those keys together with the on-chain backup data to recover an account. This is an alternative path if the encrypted Robo Guardian wallet-seed backup is unavailable.

Recovery process​

Once the required material is imported, the recovery process:

  1. reads the encrypted backup stored on-chain
  2. decrypts the required recovery material
  3. identifies the recoverable Salt accounts
  4. displays those accounts to the operator

From there, the operator can export the private keys. The process reconstructs the private key for each recovered account. These can be imported into another compatible wallet (e.g. MetaMask) and managed like any standard blockchain account.

Disaster-recovery considerations​

Once recovery begins, treat the recovered accounts as compromised. The process reconstructs the key material and stores it locally on the machine running it, so Salt's distributed MPC guarantees no longer apply to those accounts.

The intended workflow is therefore:

  1. recover access to the accounts
  2. transfer all digital assets to newly created secure wallets
  3. retire the recovered accounts

Independence from Salt​

A core design goal is complete independence from Salt's hosted infrastructure. The recovery process:

  • does not require access to the Salt backend
  • does not rely on Salt-operated services
  • uses only publicly available blockchain data
  • uses cryptographic material supplied by the operator
  • can be audited and verified because it is open source

This ensures organisations retain the ability to recover and move their assets even if Salt is permanently unavailable.

Operational guidance​

Initiate the recovery process only during disaster-recovery scenarios. Afterwards, move all recovered assets into newly created Salt accounts or other secure wallets. Because recovery consolidates key material onto a single machine, the recovered accounts should not be used for ongoing custody.

See also​