A Proposal for Account Recovery in Decentralized Applications

Decentralized applications achieve stronger security and fault tolerance by placing trust in the majority of users instead of a single third party. However, it also means that there will be no administrator to handle unexpected situations. Because there is no trusted central management service, a decentralized application can do little when a user loses their private key that unlocks the tokens and other assets the user possesses, and users are responsible for keeping exclusive control of their private keys. Therefore, as decentralized applications are becoming mainstream, and more and more non-tech savvy users began to use these decentralized apps, account recovery will be a much-needed feature. In this paper, we propose a method to recover an account by an arbitration process that utilizes the information asymmetry between the regular users and trade partners an individual may have had over the life of their blockchain account for which they lost access. Our method involves a spam filter to separate legitimate requests from malicious or spam requests, a robust voting mechanism backed by game-theoretic insights, and an extensive set of controls to avert any attacks.