Tutorial: Changing Your Recovery Account

r351574nc3(72)

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Phishing is Real

Recently, one of my followers accounts was hijacked through a phishing scheme. I suddenly became very interested in what preparations I have made for myself to recover my account if it were ever hijacked. If I managed to get to it in time, I could quickly change the password. What if the hijacker changes my password though? Then what can I do?

When you first create an account, @steem is the main recovery account.

This puts you in a precarious situation if your account is hijacked and/or you lose your master password. @steem is the only account that can recover your account. Without any way to prove you actually own the account, recovery is impossible. The best thing you can do is get ahead of this. You can change your recovery account.

Audience

This tutorial is intended for anyone with nodejs experience.

The Project

I'll use my daughter's account in this example since I am concerned that if anything happens, I can recover her account for her.

My examples can be found in my github repository. The recovery.ts is where the majority of the source code exists for this example.

Usage

This project is written with Typescript. The only requirement really is nodejs. The project can be built with

npm install ; npm run build

Before running recovery, the following environment variables need to be set

variable	description
STEEM_NAME	name of the account to change recovery for
STEEM_WIF	master password

The project can then be run with

npm run recovery <new recovery account>

New Recovery Account

We use the steem-js api to change the recovery account.

First, we need to create a private key from the master password

const pk = steem.auth.toWif(user, masterpassword, "owner");

Once the private key is set, we can now use changeRecoveryAccountAsync.

    steem.broadcast.changeRecoveryAccountAsync(pk, user, new_recovery_account, [])
        .then((results: any) => {
            console.log(JSON.stringify(results));
        });

The result will look something like:

> npm run recovery r351574nc3
{"id":"cad03816d7c5e2e3f3f65defb9d1157cc2e2a743","block_num":20257686,"trx_num":56,"expired":false,"ref_block_num":7045,"ref_block_prefix":1559991723,"expiration":"2018-02-28T06:22:24","operations":[["change_recovery_account",{"account_to_recover":"salty-mcgriddles","new_recovery_account":"r351574nc3","extensions":[]}]],"extensions":[],"signatures":["1f30ff0d6cb698d1c3542a649527b46e81b119ed9830c6b83d8cc52cd7348fc99c4620cf49d089b160fb57fd2fb63aebfb53341a474bae23beed8b66f268f4b191"]}