Shadow Guardians
Wallets can be recovered privately using a 2-of-N guardian system, keeping participant's privacy
Project Description
Privacy-preserving social recovery for Aztec wallets. Enables wallet recovery using a threshold of guardians (2-of-N) without revealing which guardians participated. Core functionality: Guardian-based recovery: requires 2 distinct guardians from a committed set to authorize recovery Privacy-preserving proofs: uses zero-knowledge proofs to verify guardian signatures and Merkle membership without revealing identities Signature collection: web interface to select guardians, collect ECDSA signatures, and submit recovery proofs On-chain verification: smart contract verifies proofs and emits recovery signals when the threshold is met How it works: Guardians are organized in a Merkle tree (root committed on-chain) To recover, collect signatures from 2 guardians on a recovery message Generate a ZK proof that verifies: the signatures are valid, both guardians are in the tree, and they are distinct Submit the proof to the contract, which verifies it and signals successful recovery The frontend provides a step-by-step interface for orchestrating this process, from selecting guardians to submitting the final proof.
How it's Made
Shadow Guardians is a monorepo with a Noir ZK circuit (Aztec Protocol v3) and a Next.js 15 frontend. The circuit uses Poseidon2 for Merkle hashing and ECDSA secp256k1 for signature verification, compiled with Nargo and generating TypeScript bindings via Aztec's codegen. The frontend uses React 18, Tailwind CSS, Material-UI, and Aztec.js to connect to PXE (Private eXecution Environment) nodes, with RainbowKit/Wagmi for L1 wallet connections. The deployment script (Bun) generates deterministic guardian key pairs, builds Merkle trees, and creates fixture files. Recovery flows through Next.js API routes that create ephemeral test wallets, convert hex data to byte arrays for circuit inputs, and submit private function calls. The architecture separates the ZK circuit (Noir) from the application layer (TypeScript/React), enabling privacy-preserving 2-of-N guardian recovery while keeping the frontend straightforward.
