Why Nostr? What is Njump?
2024-08-06 00:13:49

matt on Nostr: Oops, sorry, I forgot we can fix both sides of malicious hardware wallets - a ...

Oops, sorry, I forgot we can fix both sides of malicious hardware wallets - a malicious hardware wallet should not be able to steal your coin, it’s not complicated to force attackers to compromise both your computer *and* hardware wallet, but current devices just…. Don’t. That’s embarrassing!

(Except for multisig setups).
Hardware Wallets are devices designed to hold bearer assets which can be trivially stolen if you leak the private key(s). There’s many, many people involved in the manufacture of each hardware wallet, each of which might wish to make free money by backdooring the hardware wallet. For every other hardware wallet, you’re blindly trusting Amazon/UPS/five factories in China/the webserver you got the firmware from/etc/etc. Sure, most hardware wallets have tried to be robust against these attacks, but there’s frankly just not that much that can be done.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you didn’t have to trust the device at all, but rather an attacker would have to compromise *both* your hardware wallet and your computer? Well, we’ve had the tech to do this for many, many years! The fact that only two hardware wallets bothered to implement this boggles my mind. It’s impressive incompetence, bordering on maliciousness, honestly.
Author Public Key
npub185h9z5yxn8uc7retm0n6gkm88358lejzparxms5kmy9epr236k2qcswrdp