  In this paper, we propose a very secure and reliable owner-self-managed
private key recovery method. In recent years, Public Key Authentication (PKA)
method has been identified as the most feasible online security solution.
However, losing the private key also implies the risk of losing the ownership
of the assets associated with the private key. For key protection, the commonly
adopted something-you-x solutions require a new secret to protect the target
secret and fall into a circular protection issue as the new secret has to be
protected too. To resolve the circular protection issue and provide a truly
secure and reliable solution, we propose separating the permission and
possession of the private key. Then we create secret shares of the permission
using the open public keys of selected trustees while having the owner possess
the permission-encrypted private key. Then by applying the social
authentication method, one may easily retrieve the permission to recover the
private key. Our analysis shows that our proposed indirect-permission method is
six orders of magnitude more secure and reliable than
