2026-10-04T00:30:22Z https://drops.dagstuhl.de/oai

oai:drops-oai.dagstuhl.de:27857 2026-10-02T17:40:21Z ddc:004 open_access

SoK: Cryptographic Key Recovery for Cryptoasset Custody and Financial Technologies Sanchez, Francisco Javier Becerra Iannillo, Antonio Ken State, Radu Cryptoasset Custody Key Recovery Wallet Security Smart Accounts Threshold Cryptography Secret Sharing Decentralized Identity Secure Hardware Cryptoasset systems often bind cryptographic key control to financial control: losing a wallet seed, custody share, hardware device, or smart-account credential can remove spend authority, while compromised recovery can enable theft. Existing work treats recovery through separate vocabularies-key backup, secret sharing, account recovery, credential re-issuance, social recovery, and asset migration-making mechanisms and tradeoffs difficult to compare. This paper presents a Systematization of Knowledge (SoK) on cryptographic key recovery for cryptoasset custody and financial technologies. Starting from a 118-paper systematic-review discovery corpus, we derive a 77-paper synthesis corpus and code each retained system in a master matrix covering recovered objects, recovery semantics, mechanisms, enrollment and storage, authorization, trust placement, failure events, post-recovery state, validation evidence, deployment status, privacy, usability, and limitations. The matrix supports an axis-first taxonomy that separates secret-restoring, hybrid, control-restoring, forensic/extractive, and framework-oriented recovery. Our central observation is that recovery is not a single operation: systems may reconstruct an original secret, regenerate a seed, restore a share, reissue a credential, migrate signing authority, restore account control, move assets, or extract forensic artifacts. We derive a generalized construction model, check it against production-facing designs, and identify six findings: recovery semantics are heterogeneous; recovery shifts trust; liveness improvements create abuse paths; post-recovery lifecycle management is uneven; protocol evidence outpaces user evidence; and recovery metadata remains underprotected. These gaps motivate a research agenda for recovery-aware financial technologies. Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik Francisco Javier Becerra Sanchez and Antonio Ken Iannillo and Radu State 2026 Is Part Of LIPIcs, Volume 395, 8th Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT 2026) InProceedings Text doc-type:ResearchArticle publishedVersion application/pdf doi:10.4230/LIPIcs.AFT.2026.3 urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-278575 https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.AFT.2026.3 eng https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode