What Happens When You Lose Your Key

The Importance of Your Vault Key

Your vault key is the only way to access your encrypted conversations. Without it, your messages remain encrypted and inaccessible — even to us. This is the strength of end-to-end encryption, but it also means losing your key has consequences.

How Key Recovery Works

When you create a vault on LockNKey, you set up a recovery question and answer. This provides a safety net:

1. Recovery Question: You choose a question only you can answer (e.g., "What was my first pet's name?")
2. Recovery Answer: Your answer is used to create a separate wrapped version of the vault key
3. Recovery Process: If you forget your key, you can answer the recovery question to unwrap the vault key

The Technical Details

The recovery answer undergoes the same cryptographic process as your main key:

• Your answer → PBKDF2 (210,000 iterations) → derived key
• Derived key → AES-256-GCM → wrapped vault key
• This wrapped key is stored separately from your main wrapped key

This means the recovery system is just as secure as the primary key system.

If You Lose Both

If you forget your vault key AND can't answer the recovery question, your messages are permanently inaccessible. This is by design — it proves that our encryption works. Not even LockNKey can decrypt your messages without the key.

There is no "forgot password" email recovery because: - We don't have your email linked to specific vaults - We don't store your encryption key in any form we can access - Adding a backdoor would defeat the purpose of E2EE

Preventing Key Loss

To avoid losing access to important vaults:

1. Set Up Recovery Questions Always set up a recovery question when creating a vault. Choose something memorable but not easily guessable by others.

2. Store Keys Securely Consider using a password manager to store your vault keys. This gives you encrypted storage with master password access.

3. Share Keys with Trusted Contacts For important vaults, share the key with a trusted person who can help you recover access.

4. Use Permanent Vaults Wisely For conversations you may need to access long-term, consider using permanent vaults and storing the key securely.

5. Test Recovery After creating a vault, test the recovery process to make sure your question and answer work.

The Trade-Off

The inability to recover lost keys is a trade-off for true privacy. Services that offer "forgot password" features necessarily have access to your data — they can reset your encryption.

LockNKey chooses privacy over convenience. Your keys are yours alone, and that's the only way to guarantee that no one else can read your messages.