How to use Seedless Recovery

15 FEB 2023
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3 MIN
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How to use Seedless Recovery

Seedless Recovery from Obvious

Obvious is thrilled to announce a new way to back up your seed phrase that is more secure and is the future of seed phrase management. Recently, we announced a partnership with Silence Laboratories, to leverage secure multi-party computation that enables MPC-based seed-phrase management wallet backup of your Obvious wallet.

Today, in this blog, we’ll explain in laymen-friendly terms how it works and what cryptographic techniques we’re leveraging to make your wallet backup more secure. Let’s have a look!

What is Seedless Recovery? 

Seedless Recovery based on MPC or Multi-Party computation is a simple cryptographic scheme that involves multiple participants. 

If a single set of seed phrase is split into parts and distributed amongst participants, each participant only knows the part in their possession and must do some collective work using their part. 

Obvious and Silence labs have come up with a way of doing this called Seedless Recovery. Obvious splits the user’s seed phrase into three parts which are encrypted and can be stored in 3 different places. To restore your wallet, all you need is 2 out of the 3 parts.

what is seedless recovery
What is Seedless Recovery

Why do you need it?

Splitting up the seed into 3 parts is better than storing the complete seed phrase in case of a vulnerability or in the case that your seed phrase is exposed.

Through Seedless Recovery, even if one part of your seed phrase is exposed, it still does not give the attacker, the ability to access your funds. 

Splitting up the seed phrase also helps in case you lose your seed phrase since you can still access 2 of the other 3 parts.

This gives higher security for your wallet and funds than traditional ways of either uploading on the cloud or storing the complete seed phrase manually. 

How does it work?

Obvious gives you the option to back up your seed phrase using Seedless Recovery. Here are the three steps of Seedless Recovery.

  1. Device Key: A part of your seed phrase is stored locally on your device. 
  2. Social Key: Share a part of your seed phrase with a trusted third party as a QR code image.
  3. Cloud Key: Upload a part of your seed phrase on google cloud so that it can be retrieved again later. 

what are the different keys?
What are the different keys?

How do I use it?

When you download the Obvious app and create a new wallet, you have the option to back up your wallet using the Seedless Recovery method. 

If you are an existing user of the Obvious app, you can back up your wallet by going to More→ Security and Backup→ Backup my seed phrase option.

what is seedless recovery?
Where is seedless Recovery

Know more about how the technology works under the hood from here.

Obvious has always been committed to providing the highest level of security to their users and Silence Laboratories has helped in taking our efforts to the next level. 

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