Kintsugi: A Decentralized E2EE Key Recovery Protocol

Day 1 | 11:30 | 00:30 | UB4.132 | Emilie Ma

Note: I'm reworking this at the moment, some things won't work.

The stream isn't available yet! Check back at 11:30.

Key recovery is the process of regaining access to end-to-end encrypted data after the user has lost their device, but still has their password. Existing E2EE key recovery methods, such as those deployed by Signal and WhatsApp, centralize trust by relying on servers administered by a single provider.

In this talk, we share our recent work on Kintsugi, a decentralized recovery protocol that distributes trust over multiple recovery nodes, which could be servers run by independent parties, or end users in a peer-to-peer setting. This talk will cover how we developed Kintsugi and its unique security properties, as well as compare it to prior E2EE key recovery work.

See the WIP implementation here.