If hardware wallets have one Achilles’ heel, recovery seeds may be it. But Trezor’s SatoshiLabs has figured out a solution. Hardware wallets are generally considered to be among the most secure solutions for storing bitcoin. As the private keys to sign transactions never leave the device, these keys are never exposed to the internet and can, therefore, not be hacked remotely. Even with physical access to the device, subtracting the keys is no straightforward job — if it’s possible at all. (This appears to be an ongoing cat-and-mouse game between security researchers.) But even if we assume that they are secure, hardware wallets can still break, get lost, get stolen or become otherwise unusable. For these cases, users should keep a backup seed: a … [Read More...]
Not Your Keys, Not Your Coins: How Arwen Wants to End Exchange Custodianship
The long list of cryptocurrency exchange hacks tells the story of one of the Bitcoin industry’s biggest problems to date: Custodial exchanges are a big target for attackers and a centralized point of failure for those that rely on them. Just this year, about $200 million worth of cryptocurrency became inaccessible when QuadrigaCX’s CEO passed away, while Binance last month revealed it lost 7,000 bitcoin when its servers were hacked, a loss valued at over $40 million at the time. Over the past decade, a staggering estimate of $1.4 billion worth of crypto has been stolen or about 8 percent of all bitcoin in circulation today. If it’s up to Boston-based startup Arwen, these types of events will soon be a thing of the past. Arwen, formerly known … [Read More...]