Topic: Samsung S10 crypto wallet (Read 1238 times)

It seems like their in-built wallet makes use of a system they call Samsung Knox [1], which secures private keys by managing application privileges [2] and ensuring the integrity of said application privileges by verifying the boot process on the hardware level [3]. So to my understanding while private keys are probably encrypted they are not stored in a secure hardware element as is the case with common hardware wallets such as the Trezor or Ledger. Samsung Knox's track record is not exactly splendid [4][5] but I guess we'll see in the next few months whether they have brought their shit together.

[1] https://www.coindesk.com/samsung-galaxy-s10-includes-private-crypto-key-storage
[2] https://developer.samsung.com/tech-insights/pay/device-side-security
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_Knox
[4] https://blog.securegroup.com/why-samsung-knox-hardly-has-anything-to-do-with-security
[5] https://www.tomsguide.com/us/samsung-knox-lock-hack,news-30062.html

It is no more or less secure than any other software wallet out there. It mainly depends on the user controlling the device. The end-user needs to take the necessary steps to secure his wallet, not Samsung.

How could be it secured? I'm just ask if Samsung brand produced by korea could be invulnerable to the hackers but it seems it's a great steps on some big company on trust to bitcoin and i hope others big company could create something bigger on that idea.

So presumably several million S10s have been sold now. Not one person here has mentioned using it. There are virtually no articles about it. Looks like it's been a monster nothingburger. Being non BTC and possibly Korea only won't help of course. I still can't figure out whether it's been made unavailable to certain markets or not. All in all a damp squib.

Interesting article on the Samsung S10 phone getting hacked by bypassing fingerprint recognition: link

This certainly isn't a new development since it has already been shown that 3D printed faces can be used to bypass facial recognition (link).

Seems like an easy way to avoid getting compromised is to just switch to using a pin.

This is good that Samsung phone have a crypto wallet, but i will not pay so much for a phone, never, i think this phones are so much extra evaluated and not worth so much money.

The mining thing was just a contracted chip job. They don't give a shit what they're making as long as it makes money. They get fed the design, churn it out, bank the money. All they did was the physical creation.

That's a good point about the path of least resistance. They could've wasted an awful lot of time dicking around with all the varying crap that's out there. But BTC will be simpler and much more in demand. We shall see if they add it.

Short of having stakes in these tokens my guess is that they simply wanted to take the easiest route of adding as many currencies / tokens as possible with minimal effort. With this goal in mind Ethereum is a rather sane choice. Especially since they already went for Enjin and Cosmo Coin -- presumably due to their dev teams also residing in South Korea -- it makes sense to go for other, more popular tokens as well.

At this point I'd usually dismiss Samsung as half-heartedly jumping the bandwagon, however their earlier plans of getting involved in the production of Bitcoin ASIC miners (whatever the current state may be) makes me think that they might be actually serious about crypto and are still in the process of getting their feet weet.

They're all nothing but ETH tokens. They obviously couldn't see past that. That seems like a very strange decision to me as ETH is big but not THAT big. Perhaps they believe it's going to take over the world and anything else would be a waste of their time. I think it's ultimately a dead end myself.

That is a very unusual choice of coins/tokens to include in the wallet. I wonder why there is no support for Bitcoin?! According to the source you provided they will include:

Ethereum
TrueUSD
BAT
Reputation
Revain
ChainLink Token
Paxos Standard
Maker
USD Coin
Pundi X Token
BNB
CosmoCoin
OmiseGO
Populous
ZRX
Enjin Coin

No support for Stellar, EOS, Monero and many other useful alts.

https://coinscribble.com/how-to-use-the-samsung-galaxy-s10-crypto-wallet/12606/guide/47/

Here's a rundown on the wallet. Still no mention of BTC so it seems like it's no part of the wallet at all, just ETH and a few of its children. It looks more fully featured than I was expecting.

Everyone has their own vision of where it's going. I can imagine that Samsung imagine it's going to integrate with the social media accounts of their users hence the inclusion of that Cosmocoin thing. You fire up the phone, enter your accounts and the wallet is ready to start playing with them.

Anyway it looks like the wallet availability is confirmed as territory dependent. Some aren't offered the option at all - https://www.chepicap.com/en/news/8103/does-the-samsung-s10-come-pre-installed-with-a-crypto-wallet-or-not-.html

Now it has been proved they do support cryptocurrency. But I don`t know why they only support ETH. Bitcoin community is huge, and those days lightning network is booming. Personally, I thought all phones shall support lightning network. To prepare for the coming future .

I saw that too. Other threads popping up (such as here and here) which seem to confirm no wallet in US, Canada, Australia, Europe or Thailand. At the moment, it seems to be a Korea exclusive. There are some reports in other threads (such as this one) which suggest that the wallet is visible on the store, just not yet downloadable, and will be released in the future. Although it's a little concerning that even Samsung support doesn't seem to know what's going on with it.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/ayven2/samsung_phone_does_not_have_blockchain_keystone/

This pisspoorly titled thread is saying they're not seeing the wallet function is not installed on a phone delivered to a non S Korean.

I remember the pre announcement wallet leaks only showing ETH as well.

https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/23/18194896/samsung-galaxy-s10-leak-hole-punch-display-blockchain-keystore

I'd be surprised if this was the case, but also strangely unsurprised too. They'd be inconveniencing potential users without it but I can't see many people buying the phone just for crypto.

i see this is the only one video where it has been said that it is eth only.

https://www.newsbtc.com/2019/03/06/samsung-galaxy-s10-bitcoin-ethereum/

The S10 wallet will ship as Ethereum only according to this. No indication as to whether they'll add Bitcoin or not.

How jolly unusual but all of their choices so far have been on the offbeat side.

It kinda makes sense for a South Korean company such as Samsung to get in touch with South Korean cryptocurrency projects such as Enjin and Cosmo. That doesn't necessarily mean that they will release this function in Korea only.

Those endorsements are plain weird. I'd love to know how all that came about.

We've also yet to see much or any mention of this system in non Korean phones. Enjin and Cosmo are pure S Korea. Might it be Korea only?

That's one way to pump a coin.

Samsung still shared some details about its cryptograph on MWC. Galaxy S10 supports Bitcoin, Ethereum, Enjin and Cosmo Coin. The latter is a small Korean project for the purchase of cosmetics.

Enjin wallet appears to be the official reference wallet for Enjin Coin as both are developed by the same team. The way I understand it ENJ strives to tokenize digital ingame-assets so I assume that's what the wallet enables -- ie. exchanging ingame-assets between players and maybe even across games. Which is also why it makes sense to target the mobile market in particular. It sounds nice in theory but I'm honestly not quite sure what to make of it.



Now that's the 21 million Bitcoin question, isn't it?

Wow, you weren't kidding. From 3.6 cents to 10 cents in 24 hours. Especially considering it's had 24 hour volumes as low as $200,000 over the last few weeks. Some bag holders just had a very nice surprise.

I've never heard of the coin or the wallet - are they intrinsically linked? Does the wallet use the coin for anything in particular? Does Samsung using this wallet mean the coin is going to see more use, or is this pump all just "jumping on the bandwagon", as it were?

The market already reacted to this news, Enjin Coin just made a huge jump. Not bad for a vaguely known alt, if that's really happening it looks like they got a pretty good deal.



Which would put them at the security level of regular desktop and mobile wallets, but not hardware wallets. But yes, we'll see. Definitely worth keeping an eye on regardless.

https://www.cryptoglobe.com/latest/2019/02/samsung-galaxy-s10-reportedly-supporting-btc-eth-and-ltc-via-enjin-crypto-wallet/

It says there that it's the Enjin crypto wallet that Samsung has preinstalled. I've never head of it myself but it's had good reviews in other incarnations.

https://enjinwallet.io

It's very unlikely they're storing the plain private keys... Maybe the encrypted wallet file or such... But maybe you're right, and that's definitely going to get a lot of people to try and reverse engineer their way to get to them. But at this point it's just speculation until the phone is out. We can only wait and see.

Keep in mind that being able to back up private keys to cloud services implies that there's a way to access the stored private keys at the software level. Accordingly the private key storage may be exploitable regardless of whether a user opts-out of the cloud service backup or not. That's an attack vector that does not exist for the current generation of hardware wallets (at least the most popular ones).

Don't get me wrong, this is huge news for adoption. But assuming Samsung officially communicates a level of security akin to established hardware wallets we are looking at a potential security mess in the making.

But we'll see, I guess. For all we know this might all be a dud with them merely supporting their own Samsung-ERC20-token.

How a crypto wallet is 'supposed' to operate is still to play for. It's early in the game and the current way things operate might be fine for the weirdos like us who've been here forever. Not so for the rest yet to come.

I'm not sure how Samsung can impress on people what can go wrong while still maintaining painlessness.

Presumably at some point they're going to issue some press releases about this. Then we may get a sense of how they arrived at this apparent set up.

Exactly. The most probable course of action they're going to take is to let advanced users choose whether to back up their keys on the cloud or not, and for less knowledgable users, well, why not give them a "technically" less secure option as their data could theoretically be accessed by a third party online, but considering they're very likely to mess up and lose their keys otherwise, it's probably the most secure option for them.

Either way this could trigger a pretty big chain reaction if the target customer-base decides to embrace crypto and have it go viral.

Don't get me wrong - I'm obviously pretty excited that they have a built in crypto wallet, and yes, this might pique the interest of quite a few people who would otherwise never have heard of crypto or never have bothered to look in to it seriously. I'm just disappointed that they are doing it in this way.

As you say, this will be many people's first exposure to a crypto wallet, and so teaching them that cloud storage back-ups protected by a simple 8 character password is a good idea is, well, a bad idea. They could quite easily have offered a wallet with no such feature. I suspect the reason they are doing it is for their own safety, rather than their customers' - I'm sure they know how careless the average person is, and they don't want to have to deal with all that bad press of people losing their coins forever and blaming it on Samsung.

It might be an opt-in. It already is for all Cloud services available for Samsung. If some users feel too insecure or like having some backup for their own clumsiness, why not..

I'm honestly a bit sad about the whole skepticism from most of the community here and on reddit. Like.. guys, it's either this, or NO crypto wallet built-into a phone purchased by millions.. The crushing majority of the people who are going to buy/pre-order the S10 haven't and would have probably never even considered touching crypto. This is one of the biggest leaps towards mass adoption I have seen in years..

I kinda got excited by Samsung starting to provide secure hardware elements which would make for other interesting use cases outside of crypto-currencies as well (eg. 2FA), alas...


Dagnabbit!

Obviously you need some way to enable private key backups but cloud storage is one of the most unfortunate ways to do it and leads the whole idea of secure key storage at absurdum.

Just leave it here.

I'd love to know how much research they put into it and who and what advised them. Perhaps it's dripping with disclaimers and tutorials. We'll have to wait for a non Korean who knows their stuff to have a look.

So just like Coinbase's new wallet feature, it's all backed up to a cloud server, protected by a simple user defined (and therefore horrendously weak in >95% of cases) password. Absolutely awful.

If this is true, then this is worse than just installing a normal software wallet like Coinomi on your phone. At least with a software wallet, you phone actually has to be stolen or compromised first. With a cloud back up, your keys and coins could be gone while you sleep. I don't have a Samsung account, but what are the recovery methods? If someone hacks your email, or convinces your phone company to transfer your number (happens way more than you would think), then presumably they can just reset your Samsung account password and then use that to get your private keys?

I'm disappointed to say the least.

https://www.coindesk.com/hands-on-preview-of-samsungs-galaxy-s10-phone-reveals-new-crypto-details

More of a preview here. The security set up doesn't sound like what we all know and love. It's looking like a pass to me.


'The S10 allows users to store private keys either in the secure enclave or via a third-party service, the terms indicate.

But what do you do about your private keys if you lose your phone? According to the T&Cs, the private keys stored in the S10’s Keystore are backed up in a personal account provided by Samsung. If the phone is lost or stolen, users can access the device and delete the private key through its Find My Mobile service. Further, if a private key is accidentally deleted, users can restore it via the service.

Centralizing key storage in this way is bound to raise questions about security and it remains to be seen what would happen if someone gained access to your Find My Mobile service and if Samsung might provide further protections.'

I don't understand what you mean. Source?

If you're talking about Android versions, it's simply because older smartphones can't run new android versions. This is a hardware limitation.

But saying you don't trust Samsung "to stay on top of how manic crypto is" is just naive. Forget crypto, do you even know how much data they have on their hands?

Every samsung phone comes with extra drivers, features & settings, themes and software specific to samsung. Samsung Knox which existed for years now is their solution for encrypting data, which is the one that will include the crypto wallets. Every Samsung phone gives you access to creating a Samsung account, where your data becomes linked to. This could include your media, applications, and probably usage statistics and creepy tracking data. And don't even get me started on software like Samsung Pay, Samsung VR, and things like linking your phone to your Samsung TV and similar proprietary solutions.

The amount of codebase AND data that Samsung has to maintain is way larger than any "blockchain developer" out there. Even the amount of users is probably tens to a hundred times more.

"You have nodes, maintenance, keeping on top of forks, upgrades. If I were them I'd much rather leave the actual operation to other parties who are interested in doing it." This sounds like sarcasm more than anything. Samsung could hire a single senior dev that worked on blockchain and within 6 months probably come up with their own crypto coded from scratch. And you're telling me that they're going to have a hard time maintaining a crypto wallet? What?

Hello, Samsung CEO.

Considering how happy Samsung are to abandon upgrading the OS of most of their devices, the core system that makes it all possible where vulnerabilities could pop up at any moment, then I would not trust them to stay on top of how manic crypto is.

What parties? You're SERIOUSLY SERIOUSLY undetmining the workforce of samsung. Theg're a multimillion dollar company that have to work on massive codebases constantly to come up with improvements. They know Android and linux like the back of their pockets, and on every new phone come up with new software to remain competitive. Who exactly are you nominating here as "other parties"? Almost all wallets are open source projects maintained by a group of fanatics that definitely know what they're doing, but probably never witnessed even near the amount of stress and competition as the smartphone market.


Ledger and Trezor dont only worry about firmware, they're hardware wallets. Standalone chips which JOB is to be as secure as possible against a multitude of attack vectors. This samsung wallet is the equivalent of installing electrum on your linux. Android is the OS, and the rest is just software. Anyone can build it, and all it has to do is its function.

Well I'm sceptical about Samsung themselves running a wallet. You have nodes, maintenance, keeping on top of forks, upgrades. If I were them I'd much rather leave the actual operation to other parties who are interested in doing it.

Look at the amount of hassle Ledger and Trezor get from their users regarding firmware, forks and adding projects. I can't see Samsung bothering to engage with users like that, and users won't put up with faceless masters.

Much better for them to plop a storage solution down and let the rest of the world make something of it. It sounds like they're rolling out soon so we'll get the juicy gossip rapidly.

Edit - tutorial type thing in this video - https://twitter.com/BlockchainROK/status/1098417940167221248?s=20

It looks rather wallet esque after all. And they have a weird ETH fixation.

It will be at least curious. It seems to be a new approach. Any technology related to tap to pay will be massively used in the next few years. As some are joking, the only use of the fiat on paper will be for criminal activity.

I believe they can still offer a Wallet, but as software. In this description, they talk more about the hardware. That is, the Samsung Knox will be superior protection than those offered by any software. Maybe very similar to the traditional hardware wallets.

Confirmed - https://news.samsung.com/global/samsung-raises-the-bar-with-galaxy-s10-more-screen-cameras-and-choices

No details, but the interesting thing is the wording. It makes no mention of a wallet, just pure private key storage.

I'm going to guess that Samsung don't want anything to do with running an actual wallet. That's a ton of work and hassle with no upside. I think they're going to let wallet developers interact with what you have stored in your phone which means it's possible you'll be able to store anything in there provided someone develops it.

Let's see what details arrive next.

Who cares, who would trust his/her cryptos to a Samsung device? Keep using cold storage, or open source software

The innovation is actually good considering that cryptocurrency is very popular now, unlike before, people still look at cryptocurrency.
But the thing to note is the security problem, because people will always ask that question.
Has it really been tested or is still in the beta stage because if an error occurs in the security system it will be fatal to the Samsung name itself.

You should ask Samsung about that. I don't know what it is but looks like a battery indicator (why double though?). It's not related to the wallet/blockchain I bet.

what is about this ?!

It might be clickbait article but it is possible.

When one of the big companies of korea , Hyundai   can launch their ICO , then I forsee Samsung might be releasing the wallet.

Just wondering , if Samsung launch its own ICO/blockchain in near future.

Yes. However I think that this is inevitable, as there are many people who will want to use bitcoin in the future, but are not willing to control private keys and deal with those security stuff (which is not easy for older people, or users who are not interested in new technologies).

There are many people who still struggle to use whatsapp or a smartphone. If there is a simple option for those people to use bitcoin, I think it´s a valid choice.



+1 to Samsung. South Korea is really a great place for cryptocurrency, good to see South Korean companies pushing on adoption!

HTC has made a blockchain phone. Samsung had to do something on this direction. Maybe a wallet makes more sense, although I feel like this is more about commercial/buzz than actual utility.
I am not really impressed (yet).

Oh, absolutely. Samsung is worth many billions more than the entire market cap of all cryptocurrencies. Risking their reputation by stealing a relatively tiny amount of crypto makes absolutely no business sense. My concern isn't with Samsung, however. Any and every web wallet has the same security risks regardless of who owns it. Unfortunately, as you say, many still choose convenience over security.

This is also speculation, of course. It hope it is something a bit more secure than a web wallet after all.

They'll use the magic word: "Disclaimer" to handle this. I think Samsung will have some short of security to protect the wallet such as pin or something like that, but we don't really know unless we can try the device.


Even if it is like that, I don't think it's a problem for some people. They'll choose simplicity over security, and the potential of Samsung abusing their power for this business is quite minuscule. Unless they wanted to be labeled as exit scam, or they somehow find a way to stole their user crypto without being detected.


Make sense. GoJek also did the same by acquiring Coins.ph. Let's hope people who bought and use this will have enough awareness that their crypto can get stolen anytime if they're not careful enough.

Are we sure this isn't just a web wallet? Given that most of the Samsung software that comes bundled with Samsung phones requires you to create a Samsung account, I wouldn't be surprised if this app is no different. As others have said, I also don't see why they would open themselves up to the possibility of phones being lost/stolen/damaged and users losing their coins forever, and all the complaints and liability that would come with that. The word "KeyStore" to me just makes it sound like Samsung will be storing your keys and you will be able to recover your account if you lose your phone.

But they'd have less burden about laws/regulation as it's managed by Coinbase and don't risk their reputation with cryptocurrency directly which can be seen as negative things by some people.


They already bother to do that by launch Samsung Pay few years ago, the only difficulty is regarding cryptocurrency law/regulation, but they're big company and they won't be the first to launch such services.

If you think about a business's point of view, investing in a cryptocurrency wallet would be very disruptive and would put Samsung ahead of your main competitors who are Google Wallet and Apple Pay.

Smartphones are already being commonly used as a means of payment. In China, wechat is already one of the most used means to pay for anything. a few people are using fiat daily.

Having a cryptocurrency wallet though looks like something really risky, it's actually great. It is an engineering responsibility, but not a financial one. Apple Pay needs to work with several other financial companies to function. This means lobbying governments, trade agreements, and a lot of marketing spending. But in the case of Samsung, they need to have only one app working well and the coin enthusiasts will do the rest.

Is it really a bad thing though? Honestly, as long as they give the option for people to be in control of their private keys, it's a big difference compared to centralized solutions like coinbase.com. The rest just becomes marketing and word of mouth. If a user is just slightly knowledgable and do just some superficial google research, they'll be able to figure out the basics at least. Or we could just start threads here and there to let people know the danger, in case Samsung's alternative solution makes them in control of something they shouldn't have.

But to sum it up in one line, I'd honestly rather see the average Joe use bitcoin with baby-proof solutions, rather than see him discard the idea as a whole because it's too complicated. Especially because this average Joe is going to become the most likely target of easy scams in the future.

This sort of news gives me mixed feels. I like Bitcoin and crypto being adopted by tech giants just like the next guy, but I'm afraid this will lead to propositions like "it's dangerous to be in control of your private keys, if you're not a professional securely backup your keys on Samsung Knox" (or w/e key storing solution they'll offer).

Trading security for comfort isn't something new in Bitcoinland either, web based wallet have been available since like 2011. But the underlying beauty of all this is that nobody tells you how to use it.

Do you really think Samsung would want to get involved in custodial stuff or money at all? They're primarily a hardware company. They supply utility for their users to go off and do their own thing.

I'm very curious to see what they've put together. If I were them I would've steered clear of this unless I was totally confident. There's a lot of liability issues.

I do not think there's any reason for somebody to fake such news, so it is probably about something real for which Samsung has been working for a long time. Still I hope they know what they are doing, because it is about people money at the end.

Yet it would be interesting to see how will people react to the fact that one big company such as Samsung offers crypto wallet as part of the basic applications in their latest phone. It can certainly help promote BTC and some other coins, but there remains the question of safety and user support in using such app.

Honestly it doesnt look like it, Samsung are way too big to use coinbase for something they can trivially implement themselves.

https://www.sammobile.com/2018/12/11/exclusive-samsung-bitcoin-app-cold-wallet-cryptocurrencies/

Apparently you'll be able to import existing wallets or create new ones recoverable with seeds, which means you obviously control the private keys.

The biggest part about this is that its not just a bitcoin wallet.. Which is HUGE imo.. Samsung has a fucking massive market share, if they market not only bitcoin, but also other altcoins to people this is definitely going to blow up.

I would wager it's just regular cryptocurrency wallet just like Coinbase where user don't have control over their key (even if the leaked image showed otherwise) or have fancy features such as ShapeShift to convert coin easily and built-in store/3rd party store. Cryptocurrency isn't that popular to the point where Samsung bother make hardware-parts just for Cryptocurrency.

Yeah, this is what most confusing tbh. It seems the leaks come from a tweet of somebody who gets a special first look at Samsung S10, CCN also reports the same thing[1]. Anyway, I don't buy and use Samsung, Electrum or Core is my choice!

[1] https://www.ccn.com/samsung-galaxy-s10-bitcoin-wallet-leaked-by-insider-is-it-official/

that picture doesn't really prove anything though! it might be another advertisement technique that Samsung is using to say their phones are powerful like the one they did last year where they took old phones back for recycling, attached them together instead and started mining bitcoin with it!



p.s. it is also pretty weird that the image is showing "bitcoin" symbol in the wallet alone but the popup message says "supported cryptocurrencies: ETH"!

Have you checked the Twitter link? It shows a snapshot of Samsung Blockchain private key management or something like that. Looks like it only support ETH at this moment. I doubt it was faked.

I don't really think it is necessary tbh, there are many wallet apps on play store which can be downloaded anytime. On top of that, I wonder will the new user really understand how to secure their pkey in a short amount of time if there's no proper guide. We don't know the source code too so it's hard to determine how secure this integrated crypto wallet from Samsung.

Anyway, I'd not risk my pkey by putting it on my phone.

Interesting. If I had to bed, I would bet on it being a hoax. To me Samsung is too big to officially support crypto. It may be just a clickbait article.

If it turns out true, it's good news. Beside the point that storing bitcoin on your phone is dumb (at least any relevant amounts) and Samsung promoting altcoins will just lead to indirectly promoting scams, ultimately the net result I would say is rather positive for Bitcoin if it ends up being real. Everyone will have by default a Bitcoin wallet, at least a small % of these ones will be bright enough to learn at a deeper lever about Bitcoin, that's something positive.

https://twitter.com/mweinbachxda/status/1088102644386881537?s=21

https://www.trustedreviews.com/news/samsung-galaxy-s10-will-hand-cryptocurrency-massive-boost-2019-3649742

Who knows whether this is the real deal or not but there've certainly been enough rumbles about this over time.

I presume there must be some sort of secure element in there. Going on their track record of rapidly getting bored of updating their products, have they truly thought this through? This isn't just another shitty app. There might be a lot of user money on the line.