# Account recovery What happens when a customer cannot get into their account, and what the shop can do about it. Written for #42, which exists because this is the piece most likely to be skipped and most expensive to discover missing. Every other issue in the passkeys project adds a capability. This one is the safety net. ## The short version | The customer has lost | They can recover by | Self-service | | --- | --- | --- | | Their password | A reset link emailed to them | Yes | | Their passkey or the device holding it | Signing in with their password | Yes | | Every passkey and their password | A reset link emailed to them | Yes | | Access to their email address | Contacting the shop, which moves the account | No | The email address is the root of trust. Every self-service route above ends at it, and none of them can work without it. ## A password reset removes every passkey This is the decision #42 existed to make, and it is deliberate. A reset is the recovery path, and recovery has to be complete. The reset already deletes every session on the account, on the reasoning that a reset prompted by a compromise must not leave an intruder signed in for the remaining 30 days of their cookie. A passkey an intruder registered has no expiry at all. Leaving those behind would mean a customer can recover their password and still not have their account back. The obvious objection is that this lets whoever controls the mailbox strip a customer's passkeys. It does, and it costs nothing: anyone who can complete a reset already controls the email address and therefore already controls the account. The passkeys were not protecting anything by that point. Consequences worth knowing: - The customer is told before they act. The reset email and the reset form both say it, unconditionally. The form is not signed in and is never told whether the account has passkeys, because answering that would make the reset page an oracle for it. - The customer is told after they act, with a count, and only when the count is more than zero. This is the one moment that count can be reported: the rows are gone by the time anyone could go and look. A customer told two were removed who only remembers registering one has just learned something they could not otherwise find out. - Any WebAuthn challenge in flight goes too. An intruder who pressed "add a passkey" moments before the reset could otherwise finish the ceremony afterwards and put a credential straight back. ## Changing a password does not remove passkeys The asymmetry with the paragraph above is intentional. `change-password` requires the current password from someone already signed in. Nothing about that suggests a lockout or a compromise, and it already spares the current session for the same reason. A customer who suspects one particular device can revoke that device by name from the account page, which is a better tool than deleting everything. A reset has no idea which credential is the problem, so it takes all of them. A change knows the customer is present and in control, so it takes none. ## Losing the authenticator is not a lockout A customer who loses the phone or key holding their passkey signs in with their password as normal, and revokes the lost credential from the account page. This needs no support involvement and no new capability, which is why #42 implements nothing for it. This holds only while every account has a password. It stops holding when #332 lands social sign-in, which creates the first customers with no password at all. Their recovery route is the identity provider, not a reset link, and #332 owns that question. The revocation guard in `backend/src/routes/passkeys.ts` already refuses to delete a customer's only way in, written against that condition rather than against today's schema, so it starts holding on its own the moment the condition changes. ## Losing the email address is a lockout There is no self-service recovery, and there should not be. Recovering an account whose email is gone means proving identity some other way, and this shop holds no other way — no phone number, no security questions, no identity documents. Anything invented to fill that gap would be a weaker credential than the one it replaces, and would become the easiest way to take an account over. The route is manual, and it runs through the shop owner: 1. The customer makes contact by whatever means they have. 2. The owner verifies them against order history — items bought, dates, the shipping address on file. A stranger has none of that. 3. The owner opens the customer in Admin, Customers, and uses **Move to a new address** on the detail drawer. Step 3 was added by #337. Before it existed the only answer was a database edit by hand, which left no record of who did it or why. ### What the move does, and why Say plainly what it is: **this operation and an account takeover are the same operation.** They differ only in whether the verification in step 2 was sound, and nothing in the software can check that. Everything the move does is aimed at that fact. - **It asks for a written reason, and refuses without one.** The reason is recorded against the account and never shown to the customer. It is the only thing that distinguishes a genuine recovery from a takeover afterwards. - **It emails the address being replaced.** If the recovery was sound this reaches nobody, which costs nothing. If it was not, it reaches the real owner, who is the only person who can say so. That mail has its own wording, because the self-service notice says "if you did not make this change, contact us" and here somebody already did. - **It sends a confirmation link to the new address and marks it unverified.** A customer reading an address out over the phone has not demonstrated they can receive mail at it. This is the commonest way the move goes wrong harmlessly. - **It signs the customer out everywhere, removes every passkey, and cancels outstanding reset links.** Same reasoning as a password reset, with more force: somebody the system cannot identify asked for this, so a session or credential surviving it is one the new owner cannot see or revoke, and a reset link sitting in the old mailbox would let whoever reads it take the account straight back. - **It does not change the password.** What the customer lost was the mailbox, not the password, so demanding a new one adds a step for no gain. The history of moves on an account is shown on the same drawer, with the reasons. It renders nothing at all for the overwhelming majority of customers, who have never been moved. ### What it still does not do There is no per-admin identity to record. Admin access is one shared gate secret in front of a single operator, so a "who" column could only ever hold a constant, and a constant dressed up as an identity is worse than an honest absence. If per-admin identity ever arrives, the record gains a column then.