Security & Control Advanced
Access Governance to Assets
An asset that depends on a single secret depends on a single person. How to distribute this power without losing control.
- Author
- FINOVEX Academy
- AI-generated text
- Published
- Reading time
- 11 mins read
In digital assets, control is access. Whoever can sign, holds the power. Every serious protection structure starts by recognising this and by separating who can initiate a transaction from who can complete it.
Separate initiation from approval
The four-eyes rule has existed for centuries in asset custody and has not lost its usefulness: the person who proposes the transfer is not the one who authorises it. Applied to digital assets, it turns an individual error - or coercion - into an event that requires complicity to occur.
The inventory almost nobody has
Before any control, it is necessary to know what exists: how many keys, where they are, who holds them, which device signs what and what happens if each of these elements disappears tomorrow. Without an inventory, the continuity plan is fiction.
- Record each key, its holder and its purpose.
- Define limits per transaction and per period, with separate approval above the limit.
- Maintain a list of authorised addresses and a waiting period to add new ones.
- Rehearse recovery with those who would inherit access, and not only with those who operate it.
A control that has never been tested is not a control. It is an intention.
