We adopted a Secure Element, the standard defense mechanism against physical attacks, but also implemented another security mainstay of the traditional banking industry - a self-destruct mechanism that triggers upon disassembly. Physical attacks are frequently disclosed in the hardware wallet industry. Keystone has implemented similar packaging measures for their hardware wallets but has also introduced a Web Authentication process which is much more meaningful in raising the attack costs for an attacker. Supply chain attacks are also dangerous partly because the only protection most hardware wallets have is tamper-proof packaging which does not prohibitively increase the cost of an attack for a sophisticated or seasoned attacker. Using QR codes or microSD cards for data transmission has significant security advantages for air-gapping your keys compared to USB and Bluetooth, in which these data transmission methods have larger attack surfaces due to their interactive connections. In terms of how air-gapped your hardware wallet is and how costly it is for a hacker to steal your assets, how a hardware wallet connects to its companion app is crucial. Hardware wallets isolate your private keys from the internet because physical attacks cost significantly more than remote ones. What hardware wallets do is implement mechanisms that effectively build up the attack cost without significantly raising the costs for the hardware wallet owner. Nothing on this planet is unhackable - to a hacker, it’s just a matter of costs vs profits. To provide the community with solutions that achieve financial sovereignty, it’s important to view the user experience holistically and account for all the aspects of the storage process, including the potential for human error which new users may be more prone to. In the language of digital security, this is commonly known as the need to avoid a single point of failure - it only takes one thing to go wrong for a person to lose all their coins.
The same is true for hardware wallets as focusing on several aspects would result in the neglect of other aspects that leaves the hardware wallet with vulnerabilities negating the effectiveness of the entire device as a whole. The Wooden Bucket Theory states that the bucket capacity is determined by a bucket’s shortest stave. A water bucket only holds as much water as its shortest stave can contain.īuilding a hardware wallet to protect your assets is very much like making a wooden bucket to hold water.
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