SoK: Cryptographic Key Recovery for Cryptoasset Custody and Financial Technologies

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 7 Aug 2026] SoK: Cryptographic Key Recovery for Cryptoasset Custody and Financial Technologies Francisco Javier Becerra Sanchez, Antonio Ken Iannillo, Radu State 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. Comments: 72 pages, 2 figures, 18 tables. Full version of the paper accepted at the International Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT 2026). Includes the complete 77-system master matrix and seven-stage recovery walkthroughs. Reproducibility package: this https URL Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR) Cite as: arXiv:2608.07104 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2608.07104v1 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.07104 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Francisco Javier Becerra Sanchez [view email] [v1] Fri, 7 Aug 2026 11:00:33 UTC (276 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-08 Change to browse by: cs References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)