Comment by redox99
17 days ago
I never understood why people considered specialized hardware more secure than general purpose hardware.
A hardware wallet is way way way more likely to be backdoored[1] than an off the shelve Intel or AMD CPU.
[1] by people wanting to steal your crypto (unlike the NSA or Intel)
I believe it was Ledger that said if you can hack their wallet you will become their CSO, looks like they owe someone a job!
With how much money they(the hacker) made, the package they have to offer gonna be insane.
Yup, if they are in business long enough to onboard the hire...
may be they already had someone without them knowing.
Well this is a tradeoff. In theory a specialized device is more robust and has a smaller attack surface. Consider something running Linux with some libc and a whole host of other shared libs. Sure they have some robustness because they're so widely used but that's a massive attack surface. There is a solid argument for dedicated hardware.
Also, general purpose hardware doesn't really prevent this as much as you might like. You're still subject to supply chain attacks even if Linux (etc) are quite secure. Look at supply chain attacks we've had in the npm and other ecosystems.
it's about signal to noise ratio. if you spend money for specialized device, it's a good chance you have more money in your wallet.
My current pet-peeve with the top providers is that they all refuse a fully-airgapped solution. You have all these widgets and gadgets like it's a toy when you are planning to hold millions in there. Their apps are also a joke and polymarket-like these days.
At this point, the best is a 2-multi-sig solution where one is some hardware wallet and the second is an iPhone app wallet where the seed is stored digitally only. So even if your offline seed is compromised, you are still covered.