Recovery

Clavitor has no "forgot password" link. There is nothing to forget — you sign in with a hardware key, not a password. But hardware keys get lost, get stolen, get left in old laptops. Recovery exists for that, and it is deliberately different from every other password manager you have used.

How it works, in two minutes

When you create your account, you generate a recovery code: 48 characters, displayed in an 8×6 grid. You keep it on paper, in an email to yourself, in cloud storage — wherever you will find it again.

Clavitor holds a separate 32-byte random value called the recovery anchor, paired with your account. Neither piece alone unlocks anything — the two are combined to reconstruct your key, and getting our piece requires a live Zoom call with a real human at Clavitor.

If you ever need to recover:

1. You bring your recovery code. 2. You email support@clavitor.ai and we invite you to a Zoom call. 3. On the call, you pass a human verification step using material you set up in advance — a code phrase, a video link, a photo. Your choice. 4. The operator reads you a session code on the call. 5. Your browser uses the session code to fetch our half and reconstructs the key on your device. The server never sees your decryption key, even during recovery.

If your key is stolen instead of lost, the same flow works, and at the end we revoke the stolen key so it can no longer access your vault.

Why this design exists

Most password managers have a recovery flow that is a security disaster. Email resets, SMS codes, security questions — they are bypasses around the encryption. Clavitor's recovery goes through encryption, not around it.

Three properties make it safe:

• Pure entropy on both sides. Your half and our half are both 256 bits of random data. Guessing one without the other is mathematically infeasible.
• A human gate. No automated endpoint, no rate limit to brute-force around. To get our half of the key, a person at Clavitor verifies you on a Zoom call against material you stored with us.
• Server-blind, even during recovery. Our half travels to your browser. The math happens there. We never see the reconstructed key.

The trade-off is honest: recovery takes a scheduled Zoom call with a human. It is not instant, it is not 24/7-clickable, and there is no override if you lose both pieces. That is the price of real encryption.

What's in this section

• Introduction to recovery — a concrete walkthrough, start to finish
• Setting up recovery — generate your code, choose what we use to verify you
• If you lose your key — the recovery flow, step by step
• If your key is stolen — same flow, plus revocation
• What we can't do — honest limits
• How recovery works — the cryptographic detail, if you are curious