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Recover a Kadena Spirekey account

After you register a device for a Kadena SpireKey account, the account details are stored on the Kadena blockchain and in the Local storage of the browser you used to register the account. You can view this information using the Developer Tools for the browser by selecting Application, then expanding Storage.

If you clear local storage—for example, by selecting Clear browsing data—or try to use a different browser to access your Kadena SpireKey account, Kadena SpireKey won't be able to identify the account that belongs to you or recognize you as a registered user. However, you can recover your account information through the passkey stored on any device you created your account with or added to your account. For example, if you used a smart phone to register a Kadena SpireKey account, you can use the passkey stored on that phone to recover your account information.

Identify the passkey for an account

When you register an account as described in Register an account, Kadena SpireKey creates a passkey for the device you are using with the default name SpireKey Account 1 and a selected Network. For example, if you access Kadena SpireKey deployed on the Kadena test network, the passkey created for the device and account combination would be SpireKey Account 1 (Testnet).

If you used a laptop to register this account, your passkey might be based on a fingerprint stored in a secure enclave on the device or recorded on a security key you attached to the device. If you used a phone and scanned a QR code to register this account, your passkey might be based on facial recognition stored in a secure enclave on the phone.

Clear local storage

For demonstration purposes, assume that you registered for a Kadena SpireKey account from a browser running on your local computer. If that's the case, you can open spirekey.kadena.io in the browser and see that your account information is displayed by default from the information in local storage.

To clear local storage:

  1. Open Kadena SpireKey.

  2. Open the Developer Tools.

  3. Open the Console and type the following command:

    localStorage.setItem('localAccounts', '[]');
    localStorage.setItem('localAccounts', '[]');

  4. Refresh the browser window to display the welcome page with the Recover and Register options.

Recover your account from a passkey

To recover account information:

  1. Click Recover or open spirekey.kadena.io/recover.

  2. Click in the Passkey fingerprint section.

  3. Select the passkey for the account you want to recover.

    In this example, the passkey was created on the local computer and is named Lola (Testnet). Selecting the Lola (Testnet) passkey then prompts for a fingerprint.

    If you created the account using a passkey on your phone and want to recover the account from the browser running on a local computer, you can select a passkey using On other devices. You can then scan the QR code to select the passkey on the phone and authenticate using facial recognition.

  4. Verify your account details in the account overview.

How it works

The webauthn-guard module of the Kadena SpireKey smart contract emits a REGISTER_DEVICE event containing an account name and the credential identifier of a passkey every time that there's a successful transaction that calls either the register function or the add-device function.

The Kadena SpireKey wallet can query the chainweb-data API for the REGISTER_DEVICE events that contain the credential identifier matching the passkey you select for account recovery. If Kadena SpireKey finds a matching event, it retrieves the account name. Kadena SpireKey then calls the get-webauthn-guard function of the webauthn-wallet module using the account name as an argument to retrieve the account details from the blockchain.