11–20 of 58 posts
I'm still very much in favour of managing my own private keys in an encrypted database on my desktop/laptop. I feel like everyone is blindly trusting these devices, having been scared in to it by horror stories of malware lifting keys off machines. I will eat my paper wallets if my meagre holdings are stolen from me like that.
My greatest concern with the Ledger hardware wallet has been making sure the device hasn't been tampered with during shipment. Fortunately they provide a script to check hardware integrity, it's probably a good idea to run it before doing anything with the device. https://support.ledger.com/hc/en-us/articles/115005321449
I wonder whether these apps cache sensitive information like account numbers and balances. I think they shouldn't.
I'm still very much in favour of managing my own private keys in an encrypted database on my desktop/laptop. I feel like everyone is blindly trusting these devices, having been scared in to it by horror stories of malware lifting keys off machines. I will eat my paper wallets if my meagre holdings are stolen from me like that.
These should be safer than that. The keys are generated on a secure processor and should not ever be able to be removed from the device.
I'm still very much in favour of managing my own private keys in an encrypted database on my desktop/laptop. I feel like everyone is blindly trusting these devices, having been scared in to it by horror stories of malware lifting keys off machines. I will eat my paper wallets if my meagre holdings are stolen from me like that.
One caveat is that laptops are commonly compromised and your security would depend on nobody stealing keys/passwords needed to access your database/password manager/whatever.
Having hardware token with paper backup, makes this harder. Having a lot of tokens creates a huge incentive for getting hacked.
If you have non trivial amounts of tokens under your control, you need to consider all the points of failure. Laptops get compromised in all sorts of ways and can be equipped with key loggers or worse. Unless you are a security expert, defending against a determined & skilled hacker is super hard. Most of us never get our setups audited by an expert and I'm afraid that a bog standard OS X/linux setup is probably only get you so far. Even if you turn on disk encryption and do all the rest of the things you are supposed to do.
So the advantage of a token is that it does not depend on your laptop being uncompromised and that it is a third party solution that can be scrutinized and audited. That being said, I'm not a big fan of having a proprietary software/hardware package and would prefer to trade in my ledger for a properly OSS platform. There are a few of these platforms but it is early days and I'd need it to support Stellar though. As far as I know, ledger is the only thing working with that. I own a few of those for this reason.
IMHO there's a big market opportunity for creating a secure, easy to use hardware token for ubikey/oauthn signins, managing blockchain wallets, and doing 2fa. Not impossible, but making open hardware/software platforms commercially is apparently still a big challenge. I'd buy several if the price and feature set were right . Assuming enough auditing/vetting has happened by people that are smarter than me, of course.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
These should be safer than that. The keys are generated on a secure processor and should not ever be able to be removed from the device.
A "secure", closed source processor. Given the Ledger bootloader had a rather nasty and bluntly obvious bug in it that allowed you to bypass all of the write protection and boot any firmware, I'd give them nearly zero chance of having got anything else right.
Good to see Bluetooth in the new hardware. Lack of real mobile support for hardware wallets has been by far the biggest pain point for me. (With regard to the best possible physical security, I would have preferred NFC over Bluetooth, but the latter is alright for everyday use.)
The supply chain attacks/evil maid attacks are a much bigger issue, as pointed out in other comments.
I wonder whether these apps cache sensitive information like account numbers and balances. I think they shouldn't.
That being said - there's virtually no privacy in most cryptocurrencies. Your Bitcoin/Ethereum/Ripple/... balance is fully public.