Recovery pallet modernization

[ggwpez]

Recovery Pallet

Pallet Recovery allows you to have friends or family recover access to your account if you lose
your seed phrase or private key.

Terminology

• lost: An account that has lost access to its private key and needs to be recovered.
• friend: A befriended account that can approve a recovery process.
• initiator: An account that initiated a recovery attempt.
• recovered: An account that has been successfully recovered.
• inheritor: An account that is inheriting access to a lost account after recovery.
• attempt: An attempt to recover a lost account by an initiator.
• order: The level of trust that an account has in a friend group.
• deposit: The amount that a friends of this group needs to reserve to initiate an attempt.
• threshold: The number of friends that need to approve an attempt.
• inheritance delay: How long an attempt will be delayed before it can succeed.
• provided block: The blocks that are provided by the T::BlockNumberProvider.

Scenario: Recovering a lost account

Story of how the user Alice user loses access and is recovered by her friends.

1. Alice uses the recovery pallet to configure one or more friends groups:

• Alice picks a suitable inheritor account that will inherit the access to her account for
  each friend group. This could be a multisig.
• Alice configures all groups with via set_friend_groups.

2. Alice loses access to her account and becomes a lost account.
3. Any member (aka initiator) of Alice's friend groups become aware of the situation and
   starts a recovery attempt via initiate_attempt.
4. The friend group self-organizes and one-by-one approve the ongoing attempt via
   approve_attempt.
5. Exactly threshold friends approve the attempt (further approvals will fail since they are
   useless).
6. Any account finishes the attempt via finish_attempt after at least inheritance delay
   blocks since the initiation have passed.
7. Alice's account is now officially recovered and accessible by the inheritor account.
8. The inheritor may call control_inherited_account at any point to transfer Alice's funds
   to her new account.

Scenario: Multiple friend group try to recover an account

Alice may have configured multiple friend groups that all try to recover her account at the same
time. This can lead to a conflict of which friend group should eventually inherit the access.

1. Alice configures groups Family (delay 10d, order 0) and Friends (delay 20d, order 1).
2. Day 0: Alice loses access to her account.
3. Day 6: Friends initiate a recovery attempt for Alice.
4. Day 15: Family finally understands Polkadot and initiates an attempt as well.
5. Day 25: Family inherits access to Alice account.
6. Day 26: Friends group gets nothing since inheritance order is higher the one from Family.

In the case above you see how the Friends group is now unable to recover Alice account since
the Family group already did it and has a higher inheritance order.
Now, imagine the case that the Friends group would have started on day 4 and would have
already recovered the account on day 24. Two days later, the Family group can take access back
and will replace the inheritor account with their own. The Friends group had access for two
days since they were faster.
If Alice account has most balance locked in 28 day staking this would not make a big difference,
since only the free balance would be immediately transferable.

After a recovery attempt was completed, friend groups with a higher inheritance order cannot
open a new attempt to recover the account.

Data Structures

The pallet has three storage items, see the in-code docs [FriendGroups], [Attempts] and
[Inheritor]. Storage items may contain deposit "tickets" or similar noise and should therefore
not be read directly but only through the API.

API

Reading data can be done through the view functions:

• provided_block_number: The block number that will be used to measure time.
• friend_groups: The friend groups of an account that can initiate recovery attempts.
• attempts: Ongoing recovery attempts for a lost account.
• inheritor: The account that inherited full access to the lost account.
• inheritance: All the recovered accounts that an account inherited access to.

TODO

• Create migration from old format for Kusama
• Weights

[claravanstaden]

Do we need to generate new weights?

[ggwpez]

/cmd bench --pallet pallet_recovery --runtime asset-hub-westend

[github-actions]

Command "bench --pallet pallet_recovery --runtime asset-hub-westend" has started 🚀 See logs here

[paritytech-workflow-stopper]

All GitHub workflows were cancelled due to failure one of the required jobs.
Failed workflow url: https://github.com/paritytech/polkadot-sdk/actions/runs/21362495135
Failed job name: test-linux-stable-int

[github-actions]

Command "bench --pallet pallet_recovery --runtime asset-hub-westend" has failed ❌! See logs here