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Comment by dist-epoch

17 days ago

Multiple crypto-experts said that the safest crypto wallet is a recent iPhone in airplane mode which is only used for this purpose. Because it's much harder to implant that your average hardware crypto wallet.

19 comments

dist-epoch

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aftbit  17 days ago

On the other hand, the attack surface of an iPhone is huge compared to a dedicated hardware wallet, and it's hard to keep it in airplane mode and actually transact your coins.

  • dist-epoch  17 days ago

    You can use QR codes or USB sticks to sign offline transactions, same as with a hardware wallet.

teiferer  17 days ago

How about if you build your own airgapped hw wallet? There should be plenty folks here who would be capable of doing so. (Doesn't even have to be the most hardened and audited implementation ever since you won't release this to anybody.) This makes you vulnerable to purely very targetted attacks.

As long as the cost of sucha single-target attack isn't substantially below its potential upside, you should be safe.

Otoh, it's only meaningful if you have more than just toy assets in there.

There should be a range between those two though that would contain lots of folks comfortably.

  • dist-epoch  17 days ago

    > How about if you build your own airgapped hw wallet?

    Also known as buying a laptop, removing the WiFi card, and putting stock Ubuntu on it.

    Yeah, the problem with "crypto hardware wallets" is the same as the problem with "secure phones for drug dealers" - they are an extremely juicy targets, you KNOW that any user of them is your target.

aussieguy1234  17 days ago

How about a recent Pixel with GrapheneOS, again kept in airplane mode and only used for this purpose? Using QR codes for transaction signing.

bix6  17 days ago

Why is it harder to implant?

  • bri3d  17 days ago

    The hardware is much more sophisticated, miniaturized, and high-speed, and the supply chain is much more generic; a Ledger is a really primitive piece of hardware with a simple display interface and a ton of empty space inside it. An iPhone has no wasted space and extremely high-speed onboard buses that would be hard to sniff. Additionally, with Ledger, you know that every customer is going to be using the device to access crypto, so it's an easy target nearer the head of the supply chain. With an iPhone, you have no idea what end-user to target the implant against.

  • Gigachad  17 days ago

    You can walk in to an official Apple store and buy an iphone direct almost anywhere in the world. Crypto thieves would have to have compromised the entirety of Apple's supply chain and found space inside the iphone to fit a whole spy chip (of which there is basically none).

  • Wololooo  17 days ago

    I'm going to guess it's a number's game, you might be able to do it with an iPhone but it's not guaranteed to go to a crypto user, whereas the other one is a bespoke system for the purpose.