Wallet developer Clave has introduced the concept of Universal Recovery as a proof of concept (SoC). By combining the verification mechanism of traditional email with on-chain protocols, Clave aims to create a social recovery private key feature that simultaneously protects user privacy and security, enhancing the most important aspect of the Web3 user experience – private key management.
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PrivateKey Management is Key to User Experience
Web3 Built on Key Pair Cryptography
Social Recovery Optimizes Private Key Management
The Difficulty of Social Recovery is that Guardians Need to Have a Wallet
Introduction to Universal Recovery Mechanism
Traditional Email Verification Method: DKIM
Moving the Verification Mechanism to the Blockchain
ZKEmail Uses Zero-Knowledge Proofs to Protect Privacy
Web3 utilizes encryption technology and key pairs to eliminate intermediaries and transfer responsibility back to the user. While innovative, this approach also presents significant challenges, particularly in terms of poor user experience.
Users often lack proper knowledge of key storage and the security of modern devices for key storage, leading to a high learning curve for existing Web3 usage and reduced security due to the risk of key loss.
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Web3 ecosystem requires a user-friendly and secure private key management solution.
Social Recovery Optimizes Private Key Management
If a user loses access to their account, they will lose access to their assets. Therefore, recovery mechanisms are crucial to enhance security and user experience. One mainstream recovery mechanism is social recovery.
Social recovery requires users to designate trusted individuals as guardians for account recovery. When users lose their private keys, they can seek key fragments from their guardians to ultimately regain full access to their private keys (only the user knows who to approach for the key fragments).
This improves the user experience of general private key management and strengthens asset security.
However, the existing social recovery feature has a limitation: guardians need to have a blockchain wallet to function. This limitation prevents the mechanism from being extended to a larger user base.
Clave’s team has developed the concept of Universal Recovery to address this issue. The goal is to allow any internet user to become a guardian of on-chain accounts, even if they don’t have their own blockchain wallet.
Considering that over 4 billion people have at least one email address, creating an on-chain wallet using email can completely change the social recovery system. The team refers to this as Universal Recovery, where specific emails are authorized to initiate the recovery process.
Clave’s team has developed a proof of concept for Universal Recovery based on the EIP-4337 standard. This implementation allows users to designate any friend with an email address as a guardian, expanding the range of account recovery options in the Clave wallet.
The traditional email protocol uses DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) to ensure data integrity. DKIM uses RSA key pairs, similar but different from Web3 key algorithms.
DKIM Verification Mechanism
The sender’s server uses a private key to generate a unique digital signature for each email and attaches it to the email header.
The recipient’s server uses the sender’s public key provided in DNS records to verify the signature. If the public key successfully verifies the signature, the authenticity and security of the email are confirmed.
To achieve this mechanism, each email includes the following three elements (similar to the signature mechanism of the blockchain):
Message:
The content of the email
Signature:
Generated using a private key, message, and signature function
Public Key:
Used by the recipient to verify the signature
If this process can be verified on-chain instead of the recipient’s email server, it can trigger a private key recovery contract under the guardian’s intention, providing the functionality of recovering private keys through email.
However, directly verifying DKIM on-chain would compromise privacy because each email contains the signature, message, public key, and sender’s address. On the other hand, the blockchain itself does not support RSA signatures, and the cost of verifying signatures may be high.
Therefore, Clave’s team needed an alternative solution and ultimately chose to use zero-knowledge proofs to address the above issues.
ZKEmail Uses Zero-Knowledge Proofs to Protect Privacy
Through the off-chain ZKEmail protocol, which assists in verifying the DKIM mechanism, a zero-knowledge proof is created to prove that the message originated from a specific email address and directly links to the on-chain address of that email, simplifying the integration process of email-based and blockchain technologies while ensuring privacy and efficiency.
ZKEmail’s off-chain verification of DKIM and submission of zero-knowledge proofs to the blockchain is summarized as follows:
The user signs the message with their email address.
The signed message, signature, and public key are sent to the verifier.
The verifier verifies the email’s DKIM signature and generates a zero-knowledge proof based on the data.
The zero-knowledge proof is verified on the blockchain, establishing an on-chain account identity based on the email.
The proof verification of this implementation consumes a significant amount of gas fees. However, luckily, ZKEmail is mainly used for the purpose of recovering private keys. Therefore, it is only required during recovery and does not significantly impact user usage.
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User Experience
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