Restoring an Internet Identity with Seed Phrase doesn't work.

[aubergemediale]

[aubergemediale]

Thought: As the error message says, there is "no recovery phrase associated with the recovery phrase". I created the II on my phone, had the recovery phrase displayed to me and saved it, all the 1 + 24 words. So yeah, I got the recovery phrase, but somehow, the internet identity website failed to SAVE the "association" with the recovery phrase! So, this is not how this is supposed to work. The recovery phrase IS already a proxy to the root private key. Therefore, it should work in any case. So now I have the problem that I can't use the Identity, even though I have the recovery phrase.

I could also write code to extract the actual private key bytes from the recovery phrase by following the specification. But then, the question is, what can I do with my raw private key? Is there an API on the internet computer that allows me to create a Principal from that so that I can access my data?

For testing I created another II on my PC, not on the smartphone. This time, internet identity got it right, saved the recovery phrase among access methods, and is also able to recover the II from it. Fine, but it's still not acceptable that the authentication and access to your data - or wallet - depends on some database entry (the "association") on the internet identity website.
It must be possible to rebuild the authentication from the seed alone, otherwise this is no proper way to interact with a blockchain.

Also, it's a bit unclear what role the anchor number plays. It looks just like a database counter column to me, with no cryptographic significance whatsoever. So, when recreating it from the seed phrase, II may need to assign a new anchor number to my key chain. But that's better than locking me out, right?

Cheers!

[aubergemediale]

So, I see the anchor number is algorithmically derived from the master public key, which is derived from the private key that the seed phrase describes. Here is code that would do this:

use sha2::{Sha256, Digest};
use ed25519_dalek::VerifyingKey;

/// Compute Internet Identity anchor number from the stable Ed25519 public key
/// The public key must be the 32-byte raw key (not PEM, not base64, not the principal text!)
pub fn derive_anchor_from_public_key(pubkey_bytes: &[u8; 32]) -> u64 {
    // Step 1: Hash the 32-byte public key with SHA-256
    let hash = Sha256::digest(pubkey_bytes);

    // Step 2: Take the first 8 bytes of the hash (little-endian)
    let mut anchor_bytes = [0u8; 8];
    anchor_bytes.copy_from_slice(&hash[..8]);

    // Step 3: Interpret as little-endian u64 → this is the official anchor
    u64::from_le_bytes(anchor_bytes)
}

So there is really no reason to reject restoring an II if https://identity.ic0.app/ has "forgotten" to save "Recovery Phrase" as a method to restore the II.