Recovery kit
For an operator whose agents pay through a sigelo keeper and who must never lose the root and must survive a burnt keeper. The kit is the offline, high-security tier of sigelo made into a procedure a person can follow on a bad day: a scripted air-gapped ceremony, printed pages to tick in pen, a quarterly drill with a timeline you fill and grade, and the incident runbook bound to your own hosts, units and paths.
The vendor never receives, holds, escrows or sees any seed, key, backup.age, share or token of yours — not even "for recovery". The kit is software you run and paper you keep; facilitation is a person who reads, times and witnesses. No custody, no key material, nothing hosted.
Why it exists
One 25-word root carries the vault, the treasury, every keeper root, every agent identity and the recovery key (MONERO.md §2). Lose the words and the backup together and nothing comes back; leak them and nothing can be rotated, only abandoned. Keepers are hot (MONERO.md §4.6): when one is burnt, coins that left are gone, but identities return through recovery rotations — if you can freeze, sweep, re-key and rotate under pressure.
The first full rehearsal of that, on the stagenet soak, took 15 min 26 s from detect to the last sweep and found places where the written runbook did not work, among them: a kill -9 that systemd undid within ten seconds, a runtime mask that a user unit file silently overrode, a sweep_all that left more than a third of the wallet behind at the highest priority, a vault wallet that would have scanned for about half an hour before accepting the command meant to skip the scan, and an unmask that did not undo the mask. The kit's printed drill carries each of them, with what works instead.
What you get
| Part | What it does |
|---|---|
sigelo-kit-ceremony | One POSIX sh script. Refuses to run while the host has a default route; checks node and age; runs sigelo-offline ceremony --human so the 25 words reach your terminal and nothing else; puts backup.age and the public outputs on your removable medium and the keeper packages apart; never overwrites a root, never makes a second one; writes ceremony-record.json (what, when, which host, which tools — no secret). --verify-paper checks the paper against the fingerprint without showing what you type. |
| Printed procedure | CEREMONY.md (who is in the room, what is on paper, where each item goes, the vault-only rule), DRILL.md (detect, freeze, sweep, new identity, recovery-rotate, re-bind, post-mortem), RUNBOOK.md (the incident runbook) — rendered to self-contained HTML with page breaks, to print. |
sigelo-kit-bind | Fills your hosts, paths, units, ports, people and vault address from a small kit.json into the three documents. Refuses anything in kit.json that looks like key material. |
sigelo-kit-drill | A systemd --user timer, or a cron line, that reminds you each quarter and creates the drill's TIMELINE.md with the step table already filled in. |
sigelo-kit-grade | Scores a finished timeline offline: every step timed, evidence sha256s, sweep txids, post-mortem findings; prints your detect → frozen and detect → last sweep to beat next time. |
| Cadence | Quarterly tabletop drills; a yearly stagenet rehearsal with the paper check and a test-decrypt of backup.age. |
Everything the kit runs is already free in the repository (MIT): the ceremony, restore --words, recover, the keeper, the runbook. The kit adds the procedure around them, bound to your installation and rehearsed.
The guardrail
The vendor never receives, holds, escrows or sees any seed, key, backup.age, share or token of a customer, not even "for recovery". There is no hosted backup, no key-share escrow, no remote access to your hosts, no recovery service. This is software and facilitation — no custody, no key material — so not a crypto-asset service under MiCA. If you lose the 25 words and the backup, nobody can help you, by design; for the same reason nobody can be compelled or compromised into helping someone else.
Price and contact
- The kit:
<price>, one time. - Drill facilitation (optional):
<price>per drill. The facilitator runs the clock, reads the runbook aloud, witnesses, and writes the post-mortem with you. The facilitator never touches a key, a host or a medium. - Contact:
contact@sigelo.ioor SimpleX (see contact); vulnerabilities go to security.
Status: 0.1.0, built on sigelo 0.1.0; the ceremony is tested end to end on a real pseudo-terminal with the real age; the drill procedure is generalised from one stagenet rehearsal. Like everything here: draft, stagenet only for the keeper, unaudited.