Wallet Creation and Recovery

Creating embedded wallets

To create wallets for your users as part of the login flow you need use one of the following methods of embeddedWallet:

• configure: will create the wallet if it does not exist (where AccountTypeEnum.SMART_ACCOUNT is default), otherwise it will return the existing wallet.
• create: will always create a new wallet, of the specified type.
• recover: will recover the wallet given a specific account id. To get a list of account ids you can use embeddedWallet.list().

Decide a recovery method

Recovering the embedded wallet is needed when a user logs into a new device or when access to the embedded wallet is lost.

Openfort embedded wallets have two core recovery modes: automatic recovery and user-based recovery. At a high-level, this setting modulates how the embedded wallet's recovery share is encrypted and stored.

• Automatic recovery: The recovery share is encrypted with a combination of project entropy and Openfort's entropy. When logging into a new device, users can immediately access their embedded wallet.

• User-based recovery: The recovery share is encrypted by user-provided entropy. When logging into a new device, users must enter in their password to recover the embedded wallet on the new device. Once the embedded wallet has been recovered on a device, users will not need to enter their password on that devices again.

Automatic recovery

It is worth noting that while automatic recovery makes for smooth user UX (without needing to set up a recovery system upfront when logging in), it comes with tradeoffs. Notably, the root of trust with is in the user's authentication token. This means access to the auth token grants access to the wallet. Accordingly, this token must be properly secured at all times.

When using automatic recovery, Shield generates a password that is used for the encryption of the recovery share. The full encryption key can only be accessed if the decryption request includes the user's auth token.

From your backend, you should have an endpoint that generates an encryption session for the user. This endpoint should be protected and only accessible by the user who is requesting the encryption session (i.e. the user who is logging in).

For example, in a Next.js API route, you can create an endpoint like this:

import openfort from "./openfortAdminConfig";
 
export default async function handler(
  req: NextApiRequest,
  res: NextApiResponse
) {
  const session = await openfort.registerRecoverySession(
    "YOUR_SHIELD_PUBLISHABLE_KEY",
    "YOUR_SHIELD_SECRET_KEY",
    "YOUR_SHIELD_ENCRYPTION_SHARE"
  );
  res.status(200).send({
    session: session,
  });
}

User-based recovery

Require that users set a password when the wallet is created. Only the user can decrypt the recovery share. Openfort never sees the user's password.

Pregeneration

Openfort also allows you to pre-generate embedded wallets for your users, even before they first login to your app. Please see our pregeneration guide for more.