The Social Key Recovery by Portunus App Solves one of the Biggest Blockchain Problems

Portunus Social Key Recovery application backs up your private keys, passphrases, data, or any kind of secret documents, by splitting them up in securely encrypted fragments. Using the Shamir Secret Sharing Scheme (SSSS), the fragments are stored by your Trustees, which usually are the closest people in your social circle, like family and friends.

What is Portunus Social Key Recovery?

If you are using cryptocurrencies or care about securing passphrases, you probably thought about data recovery at some point, such as mnemonic phrases or hard drive backups. The unique Portunus Social Key Recovery splits up your private key into key pieces also called fragments, which are kept by a minimum of three Trustees who are usually in the close circle of family/friends/contacts. In case the user loses his private key, he can now restore it with the previously distributed fragments.

An Example:

Let’s assume Jane has a secret that secures something of value (cryptocurrencies would be a good example here). She worries about losing this secret and consequently, losing access to her assets. Now she might be inclined to back up her secret with people she trusts.

Hence, she uses the Portunus app for Social Key Recovery, which splits her secret into five parts and distributes those to people she is close to, her Trustees. Furthermore, she specifies that three of the five parts are necessary to recover her secret.

One day Jane loses her phone and with it her secret. At this point, she can contact three of the five people who earlier received a part of her secret. With the help of these people, she can restore her secret, and regain access to her digital assets.

How Does the Portunus App Algorithm Work?

The patented Portunus algorithm takes a key and splits it into several fragments. Using SSSS and military grade encryption, the Portunus app provides a flexible algorithm for choosing the total number of fragments and the threshold value, and it can therefore provide unique security properties for situations with different security demands.

The SSSS Introduces a Powerful Mechanism to Restore Keys Without Introducing a Single Point of Failure.

Let’s go back to our first example with Jane, but now we get more specific:

Jane holds one Bitcoin and wants to use the Portunus social recovery app to back up her private key. Her friends Bob, Carol, Anna, and Dan are already using the app. After installing the app, she enters the key and selects her friends to share the pieces of her key with. The app then splits the key into four pieces and sets the threshold value to three. Three is the minimum number of selected Trustees, meaning that any three of her friends can recover her private key.

To improve security properties, it is better to increase the number of key pieces and the threshold value. As such we might distribute a total of 6 pieces to 6 members of Jane’s family/friends and require 5 of them to reconstruct the private key.

Before splitting it up, the Portunus app encrypts the initial private key, so an adversary would not only need to collect enough pieces, but also gain knowledge about the password that decrypts the private key. If Jane forgets to create or loses her password, she will be unable to recover her key. For this reason, Portunus can also be used to safely store and recover passwords.

The Portunus app has already developed a free Android beta version (and we’re working hard on the IoS version too!) that can be accessed by subscribing to the website www.portunus.ai.

The Portunus team is constantly growing and if you or your company are interested in investing or collaborating whilst helping build a safer world, visit www.portunus.ai/contact-us/ to inquire more information and details about Portunus.

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