Recoverable Private Key Scheme for Consortium Blockchain Based on Verifiable Secret Sharing

As a current popular technology, the blockchain has a serious issue: the private key cannot be retrieved due to force majeure. Since the outcome of the blockchain-based Bitcoin, there have been many occurrences of the users who lost or forgot their private keys and could not retrieve their token wallets, and it may cause the permanent loss of their corresponding blockchain accounts, resulting in irreparable losses for the users. We propose a recoverable private key scheme for consortium blockchain based on the verifiable secret sharing which can enable the user's private key in the consortium blockchain to be securely recovered through a verifiable secret sharing method. In our secret sharing scheme, users use the biometric keys to encrypt shares, and the preset committer peers in the consortium blockchain act as the participants to store the users' private key shares. Due to the particularity of the biometric key, only the user can complete the correct secret recovery. Our comparisons with the existing mnemonic systems or the multi-signature schemes have shown that our scheme can allow users to recover their private keys without storing the passwords accurately. Hence, our scheme can improve the account security and recoverability of the data-sharing systems across physical and virtual platforms that use blockchain technology.