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arXiv · 2608.07104

SoK: Cryptographic Key Recovery for Cryptoasset Custody and Financial Technologies

Francisco Javier Becerra Sanchez·Antonio Ken Iannillo·Radu State
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Abstract

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.

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Francisco Javier Becerra Sanchez, Antonio Ken Iannillo, Radu State. 2026-08-07. SoK: Cryptographic Key Recovery for Cryptoasset Custody and Financial Technologies. https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.07104

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