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universelabs / universe

Decentralized private key recovery
https://universe.engineering
MIT License
13 stars 1 forks source link

Decentralized peer-to-peer network, Phase 3 roadmap #38

Closed itamarreif closed 5 years ago

itamarreif commented 5 years ago

Description This is a rough mock of our plans to expand Universe's key recovery service. The recovery service would augment the currently planned Core+API+KeyManager architecture, most likely by adding recovery endpoints to Core.

Network Using a decentralized peer-to-peer network, keys would be split and distributed among the participants, likely in a threshold-based construction. Retrieval from the network would require the user to provide an authorization token obtained from the KYC process.

Important issues that need to be addressed are arbitrary key storage, figuring out the KYC process, and the degree of decentralization we wish to allow. It would be interesting to allow users to chose their KYC provider out of a set of network-supported providers, allowing for different security models, varying "depths" of KYC, etc.

Experience The main goal is to achieve the recoverability offered by BIP32-esque constructions that use a mnemonic while providing the user a much more "human-readable" experience. Intuitively, this allows users to recover their cryptographic keys using their tangible, real-world identity, rather than an arcane mathematical process. The identity verification process is already one that consumers are familiar with and are willing to accept at the event that they lose access to their bank or credit card.

Additionally, part of Universe's experience would offer a streamlining of the KYC process meaning that KYC information would already be provided once during the users' onboarding process.

guylepage3 commented 5 years ago

Really great work here @itamarreif!