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If you had a way to preserve your nostr identity so that you could recover from someone compromising your nsec and it required writing a note in your nostr client, would you do it? Repost for visibility, want to see what people think.

Replies (58)

Just saying in case the DM or other bug was to get out of hand. Still not sure if I unnecessarily worried about the DM private bookmarks yada yada bug. Anyways, it would suck to lose your id (🤔 perhaps could be a blessing in some other ways cuz of.... Social Dilemma 😅). Cheers 🤙
Have thought for some time that the best way to accomplish this is with a servant/master system. Servant pubkey is the main that you use regularly. Servant identifies a master pubkey, with the note that does so including a small snippet of signed text from the master. The master would ideally be a cold-storage derivation that sees nearly no use. The master would only have one primary purpose, that being account replacement. It can send a note that identifies an account as burned, and identifies the replacement. Said note should be signable as airgapped. Clients would then swap over to the replacement and otherwise maintain continuity of messages.
Sooo not sure if this input helps but I've always wondered why we can't create revocation keys or add expirations to the nsec for this exact reason. I like the notify of new key proposal but if we already have a workflow that works for gpg keys, then why not adopt it?
I wrote a note about this type of issue yesterday. My feeling is that the key we use day to day should be a secondary key that can be changed by signing an event with a primary key (preferably a hardware one). Rationale being that the key used to log in day to day is frequently e posed to apps using it so is at a higher risk and should be quick and easy to drop. For bigger social media users the 30 days could be pretty problematic as from my understanding the compromised key would still be what most clients see as the real identity.
I think we should just take good care of the nsec and use tools like nsecbunker when possible to generate disposable little nsecs. Nostr identity won't go away by simply having the nsec compromised. We literally know each other on a good level to know someone is pretending to be someone else. Not saying it won't create confusion to start with, but I don't see it as horrible as losing a wallet seed phrase or more. Improving UX could prevent the majority of such accidents without having to implement a complex solution that most won't be able to use anyway. Unless they could of course. View quoted note →
If your nsec is compromised, isn't that gg? Would you basically recover your note history to a new nsec while some other POS is masquerading as yourself? I'm very interested to see what comes of this because I'd hate to "start over" god forbid.