Recover Accounts

Recover an Aztec account.

Aztec allows for recovery of an account for which all of the registered spending keys have been lost. The recovering party will still need the account privacy key to decrypt the associated account notes.

At a high level, what the RecoverAccountController does is it adds a trusted third party key as a new spending key for the account. This trusted third party key can then be used to add new spending keys to the account.

The RecoverAccountController does not require an Aztec account and can be used with only a funded Ethereum account. This allows anyone to initiate an account recovery.

The trusted third party key is different than the recoveryPublicKey passed to the RegistrationController during setup.

Recovery Payload

In practice, a user generates a RecoveryPayload from their account public key, their alias and a trusted third party public key. The RecoveryPayload includes the recoveryPublicKey that is used when an account is registered.

To be able to recover an account, a user must have the RecoveryPayload generated during registration. Generating a RecoveryPayload is not deterministic, you will not be able to regenerate a RecoveryPayload with the same inputs later. Store the recovery payload someplace safe!

Using the SDK to generate a RecoveryPayload:

// Store this third party key! Its what is used to recover the account.
const thirdPartySigner = await sdk.createSchnorrSigner(Buffer.alloc(32, 3, "hex";
const trustedThirdPartyPublicKey = thirdPartySigner.getPublicKey();

// Store this recovery payload! It cannot be regenerated--it includes randomness
const recoveryPayloads = await sdk.generateAccountRecoveryData(
    accounts[defaultAccountIndex].privacyAccount.id,
    alias,
    [trustedThirdPartyPublicKey]
);

You can add additional recoveryPublicKeys to an account that is already registered using the AddSpendingKeyController. See this page for more info.

Setup RecoverAccountController

AztecSdk.createRecoverAccountController(
    recoveryPayload: RecoveryPayload, 
    deposit: AssetValue, 
    fee: AssetValue, 
    depositor: EthAddress, 
    provider?: EthereumProvider): 
        Promise<RecoverAccountController>;

Arguments	Type	Description
recoveryPayload	RecoveryPayload	Contains data used to add a trusted third party spending key to an Aztec account.
deposit	AssetValue	The assetId (number) and value (bigint) to deposit. This can be 0.
fee	AssetValue	The Aztec network fee for processing the transaction.
depositor	EthAddress	The Ethereum account from which to deposit funds.
provider?	EthereumProvider	Optional Ethereum provider.

Returns

Return Type	Description
RecoverAccountController	A user instance with apis bound to the user's account id.

Usage

const controller = await sdk.createRecoverAccountController(
    recoveryPayloads[0],
    deposit,
    tokenTransferFee,
    depositor
);

await controller.createProof();
await controller.depositFundsToContract();
await controller.awaitDepositFundsToContract();
await controller.sign();
let txId = await controller.send();