Topic: It is NOT secure to use hardware wallets (and it never was) - page 5. (Read 2237 times)

Everything is safer than online wallets...

I agree with many of the comments made here. Hardwear wallets (cold storage devices) are much safer than online wallets, and my personal view is that paper wallets are the safest if you are in it for the long haul. Just make sure to purchase the desired hardwear wallet from the manufacturer, NOT from 3rd party sellers ( especially the ones you find on eBay ). 

You see we can agree on somethings but few MS developers have woken up to the fact that Microsoft is locking them
out from the OS all over the place let alone are spying on every byte of data they can see.

Who would ever had thought that you would be getting a merit from me and take it from me, I don't get many to
give away but I am stuck with MS because it's all I know.

I suspect Goolge on Android devices is nearly as bad, they both have a bad track record, both work for the CIA/NSA

hardware wallets certainly  can not give you 100% security, but I think they are the ones that are closer to total security. web wallets are definitely the worst in terms of security, paper wallet still has its risks (you can lose it, it can get damaged, it can be destroyed in the time), the dekstop wallet if you have a computer infected with a virus is dangerous. probably there is no totally safe method.

1. Keep that AMD laptop

Best advice right now is to keep pre-2013 AMD and (I think) pre-2007 Intel hardware (which in a stroke of irony are not receiving patches for those kernel memory access exploits that made the news for Intel recently).  


Alternative options to Intel/AMD (which are all compromises of some kind, and all involve more computing skills than x86 platforms):

• ARM chips (not open designs or fully user controllable, & ARM are beginning to introduce anti-features similar to those that Intel and AMD have, so careful research needed)
• IBM POWER chips (which are expensive, & not well supported, but the platform is fully user controllable AFAIK)
• RISC V chips (which are expensive, immature, & not at all widely used, although the design is more open than IBM POWER, and like POWER, whole tech platform is user controllable)

Intel and Microsoft are slowly turning the whole Wintel concept into something closer to owning a Nintendo console than using a proper computer. Using some kind of Unix style operating system on non-Intel hardware will be the only option, eventually.

While a hardware wallet is not 100% secured (nothing is 100% secured) it is definetely better than an online wallet.
The attack surface of a web wallet is by far bigger than the attack surface of a hardware wallet.

The point is: If you decide to stop using your hardware wallet and put it in a safe place.. your coins are safe. Regardless of a vulnerability.
But a web wallet on the other hand can be attacked 24/7. Not that you just have to trust the developer of the wallet, you also have to trust they
are able to secure their whole infrastructure good enough.

While hardware wallets may not be the most secured storage option, it definetely can be regarded as more secured than an online wallet.

I thought that using those hardware wallets is the most secure way of storing Bitcoins but now I am doubting, i guess i will keep my BTC on my online wallets with a password that i put on a safe place. But still i am planning to buy a ledger nano to try myself the security of that hardware wallet.

If that's the case what can we do then? What kind of microprocessor is your machine using? I mean f*c*ing intel is everywhere! I am about to change my old 2010 laptop (amd)? Do you have any suggestions?

Right, although the "someone" who has unfettered access to a computer with Intel ME is Intel themselves (and anyone else holding the code signing key for executing code on the ME processor). I think exploits were discovered last year where an attacker circumvented the use of the Intel code signing key, but I forget the specifics.


tldr: Intel owns your computer. Stop using Intel (AMD won't help you, they have a similar tech on newer CPUs too)



There's alot of skepticism about whether ME cleaning/disabling is of any real benefit. It's better than nothing, but the ME and it's firmware either still partly exists after cleaning (only something like 95% of the ME firmware can be flashed, otherwise the CPU refuses to initialise hardware components so the BIOS can load), or still exists completely after disabling (disabling is a feature that Intel designed, we're essentially trusting that the feature does what Intel claims it does).

Intel defined several negative numbered control rings for the ME to use. This means that the ME can function like a rootkit that forms an intentional part of an x86 computer's design. It cannot be removed completely, and so all Intel machines should be considered compromised hardware. The ME could lie to you about anything your machine is really doing, and surveill what happens on your machine. So the Intel ME could be used to steal all Bitcoins from every machine with an Intel ME, one can only speculate Intel must have those ME code signing keys under very limited access and very close supervision within the company.

Ironically (considering the title of this thread), hardware wallets mitigate this attack vector, as Bitcoin private keys on a hardware wallet shouldn't be accessible to the ME if a hardware wallet is secure enough. But don't let that comfort you too much, i reiterate: Intel are behaving in bad faith with their ME tech, please stop using Intel CPUs.


tldr; This should be (and may eventually become) a far more controversial scandal than Facebook selling user data to 3rd parties; Intel can collect ALL data from your machine, not just some of it. And Intel can lie to you about what your computer is really doing.

I would say that 4 months isn´t "very quickly" and definitely too long when it comes to a Bitcoin
hardware wallet.

In general I would simply advise people to spread their risk by using different ways of Bitcoin storage
simultaneously. E.g. keep a few Bitcoins in a hardware wallet, a few Bitcoins in a paper wallet where
parts of the mnemonic seed are stored at different locations, a few BTC in a  traditional wallet or a SPV client,
a few mBTC in one of the better mobile wallets (I´d recommend Samouraiwallet).
The only thing that I wouldn´t really recommend is storing Bitcoins on a computer that is often used
to browse the internet and is running a Windows OS. Storing Bitcoins on an exchange is also in general
a bad idea as the numerous exchange hacks in the past illustrate.

It is extremely unlikely that all of these different storage solutions are compromised simultaneously, which
makes it nearly impossible for you to lose all your funds. This is preferable to storing all your crypto wealth
in a single hardware wallet, because this puts you in the uncomfortable position where you are at risk
of losing 100 % of your coins if a serious vulnerability in Ledger/Trezor is discovered and exploited by
malicious actors.

On the other hand you are only risking a fraction of your Bitcoins if you heed my advice of spreading
your risk. In the long run losing 20 % of your Bitcoin stash due to a vulnerability or a lost/destroyed paper wallet
may prove to be inconsequential anyway, because 80 % of your Bitcoin stash will still be enough to make
you either financially independent or filthy rich (depending on the actual size of your BTC stash)  

All in all, I´d suggest that you should not trust any hardware wallet with 100 % of your funds and
that you should instead spread the risk by using several storage solutions.

I never said that hardware wallets are 100% secure,such a thing actually does not exist-but for daily use and for storage of not too large amounts of coins I think there is no better solution at this time.If user have 50 or 100 BTC only safe storage is something totally offline,with no connection to internet.

I read that report the day it was published and the author says :


So the greatest danger here came from delivery process,if someone wants to intercept the package and compromise the device before being delivered to the user.This is certainly possible,but if ordered directly from the manufacturer with tracking number I think the possibility of manipulation with package is very small.

All other attacks can be performed only remotely,and requires that user do some bad things like to allow install of custom MCU firmware or to have infected computer.

Ledger is update their firmware and says that all of these vulnerabilities are now fixed.Saleem Rashid confirms that some of problems are resolved in "Fixing The Attack" part,but even he is not sure that all problems are resolved.

In the end I can not guarantee that hardware wallets are worthy of trust,it is the decision of each user individually.So far there is no documented case that any user is lost coins in hardware wallet and that the cause for this is security flaw in device-but that does not mean that this will not happen in the future.

If your computer was fully encrypted and never accessed the internet, then how could it have a keylogger? Assuming it's properly airgapped, that is, no physical wifi card, ethernet card, or anything else of this nature, then even if somehow the computer got infected with a keylogger, how could the keylogger communicate with the attacker to send the logs?

Seems pretty solid to me. Meanwhile, hardware wallets have their own RNG and you can't just never be fully sure, and the fact that they are devices supposed to contain bitcoin by default it's just an obvious target.

Till this point in my reading in the crypto world, I had never even been exposed to the idea (nor did it occur to me) that hardware wallets were not as safe as they seemed. Thanks AGD for sharing this with a wider audience, was a fascinating read. At the very least, it is very good food-for-thought. 

We all are here for privacy and safety, both.
And as said somewhere, past performance does not guarantee future results. Everything is hypothetical and so is the usage of these hardwares, when even computers are not safe with our so-called perfect Anti-Virus which guarantees us that it holds the best properties and all the data that could prevent our PC from being hacked or be malware-affected, still can't fight the newer ones (Viruses) that are being badly released by those hackers with the intention to steal all our data - can you guarantee that such hardwares are trustworthy even after reading the complete PDF given herein by the OP?

I understand your stand,and many others think in that way,but is there so far even one recorded case that someone lost BTC or any other altcoin from hardware wallet and that the cause was a security breach?To my knowledge such a situation has not yet occurred,for safe storage and everyday use hardware wallets are currently the best choice.

But if user have large amount of coins and has no intention to spend them in the near future,then paper wallet represents the safest option for long term storage.Although every users need to know that paper is not something that lasts forever(or ink),we have users on this forum who have problem to read private keys because ink is faded.

It's not normal at all. Hardware wallets advertise themselves as being the most secure way of securing your private keys, but they continue to find themselves in a position that draws negative and unwanted attention. How long will people swallow this? I don't think much longer, because you can keep releasing firmware fixes and whatnot, but the more often you have to do this, the lower your overall credibility becomes as hardware wallet manufacturer. I was doubting whether or not to purchase one, but haven't done so because I am not going to put my faith in a piece of hardware that I personally don't know of what leaks its firmwire may contain that we don't yet know of, or even in the hardware part itself. I have been reading here and there that people owning hardware wallets will revert back to the old and solid paper wallets, and rightfully so.

I think that hardware wallets are still one of the safest ways for safe storage of private keys,although from time to time a security vulnerability appears,but also very quickly after that we have update which fix the problem.This is something quite normal,not only with hardware wallets,but with any other device or operating system which exists today.

Paper wallets are good for long term storage if user is make such wallet offline in 100% clean device.But instead of paper I would always choose some more durable material such as plastic or metal.Then user just need to get private keys - engrave&save them in a safe place.To check balance it's enough to have public key so there is no need to touch "paper wallet".

There shouldn't be any problems with a paper wallet as long as you generate it offline. I think there was an online generator which saved people's seeds and later stole their BTC. Extreme holder could encrypt and engrave it on something that would be fire and waterproof. That's one of the safest method if you don't plan spending your bitcoins or any other cryptocurrency for the next few years.

We have a lot of operating systems available on the Internet with different features and security measures. For example. TREZOR is open-source, this might encourage more developers, who may be concerned about security of their money, to create their own, separate version of what's supposed to run on your hardware wallet. They won't be able to fix issues connected with the hardware itself, though.

This shows that keeping our coins safe has been ultimately cut down to such levels where we cannot trust anything, except our own deeds.
Keeping it safe is a matter of how safe we try to keep it - IT"S US WHO WILL NEED TO PERFORM EVERYTHING IN A KNOWLEDGEABLE MANNER.
Though, never thought that hardwares could really be unsafe (Had different thoughts though, like if our PC itself has a malware in it and if we use ouor hardware in such device). I trust paper wallets only, but are they also trustworthy? As they come from these "ONLINE" websites only, so shall we trust them too? And if everything's prone to vulnerability, what should be the best place we may put our coins at?

I think users have far more trust in the integrity and security of the software than the coders themselves.