Comment by jon128
5 days ago
A Trezor Safe 5 costs roughly $130.
If the banks were really so concerned about malware on the user's endpoint, and they had competent CTO, then they would write an app for Trezor or offer a Trezor with their own logo and app on it and users could sign transactions with it.
Trezors show on a screen to the user "this is the amount and where to be sent that you are signing for".
Malware with high privileges on a compromised user endpoint can bamboozle the user but a hardware wallet would catch that.
You are suggesting an entirely second piece of hardware when there are people in this thread claiming (IMO correctly) that many customers prefer an app over the browser because it's very mildly more convenient.
And there is a very large swath of banking customers who I wouldn't be surprised to learn that banks will earn less than $130 from over the course of a decade.
Correct, an enTiReLy second piece of hardware. That's the whole point of a hardware wallet.
The use can be optional, I don't think anyone would suggest (or even presume?) otherwise.
Accounts with balance under $30,000 need not apply.
Many of the "good customers" (from a bank's perspective) already have a Trezor.
Big banks already require customers pay the $50 for an RSA fob anyway. No bank is providing these devices as a courtesy.
Many GrapheneOS users would rather pay out of their own pocket for a Trezor Safe 5 than have "you need to carry an additional phone too, a shit-phone" forced on them when GrapheneOS is perfectly adequate to run any app and with more meaningful security assurances than any other Android distro.
Maybe I misunderstood the point you were trying to make with your original comment, but you seemed to be suggesting that this piece of hardware could negate the risks (from the banks perspective), of allowing their apps to support non-secure devices. If your suggestion only applies to a very small subset of customers, then that doesn't allow them to put their app (which every customer can use), on the untrusted devices.
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I don't know where you live or with whom you bank, but there were plenty of hardware tokens for banking for almost two decades until phone apps took over. They are not likely to return. Managing many hardware tokens is a big undertaking and people regularly forget them or destroy them. Phones are so much easier and people generally don't want to carry extra devices. They don't even want to carry comparably tiny credit cards given the choice.
No no, we don't want tokens. We don't want that at all.
In the United States, users of Chase are already using FIDO2 to access their Chase accounts with hardware keys often priced at $15 or $20 made by a diverse set of 3rd party vendors such as Yubico, which has the same cryptography-grounded effects I suggested above. One hardware key can store private keys for several remote sites, this is a basic part of FIDO2.
Before Chase did this, I directly kvetched at Chase on LinkedIn pointing out that many smaller banks had already been securing access to accounts with FIDO2.
Trezor and Yubikey 5C devices happen to also do FIDO2, but the ultimate answer that provides end-to-end cryptography, meaning the cryptographic pieces reach all the way to the record matching the actual contents of the transaction stored at the bank, uses a different format. The legacy tokens never provided end-to-end cryptography, and from a security perspective are as crummy and vulnerable to MITM as OTP/TOTP.
As far as holding onto hardware keys, users don't lose hardware keys/wallets when those are attached to a keychain and the users are instructed to attach to add it to their general car/house keys. Attached to general car/house keys/fobs, hardware keys survive user-chaos at a much better rate than smartphones do. Other security-focused IT pros/execs have reported the same.
The key difference between those hardware tokens and hardware keys/wallets that do OpenPGP, or PIV, or the underlying cryptograpy functionality of "Bitcoin wallet", is they
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