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918 sats \ 8 replies \ @justin_shocknet 14 Aug \ parent \ on: Cake Wallet's Free 'Cupcake' App Transforms Old Smartphones Into Hardware Wallet bitcoin
Yep, and our shared outlook on that would put all HWW vendors out of business if everyone was as lucid. They sell largely on virtue signal and naivete.
If we exclude the NSA et-al from our threat model then running Bitcoin on a clean Linux or BSD install within a militarized network zone wins simply on the commodity footprint.
HWW's add risk to that by removing the benefit of obscurity, and additional software to use them creates vectors beyond what might already exist in operating systems and Bitcoin itself.
Using phones as commodity hardware per Cupcake:
Yes, I like this and its better than a purpose-built HWW (ignoring the inherent supply chain risk since its commoditized)
Not good, this adds footprint, particularly in an iOS setting where afaik you're not able to actually verify what you're running.
Also phones are not durable and easily misplaced, which highlights that it's solving the wrong problem that is the root of most lost coin: People putting seeds in stupid places either in terms of backup or recovery.
There's good solutions and simple solutions, phone signers feel like the worst of both.
There's good solutions and simple solutions, phone signers feel like the worst of both.
Nice summary. It is too bad though because phones have a power source, a processor, memory and a camera or nfc, so they have all the tools you might need to be a hardware signer. It's just a bummer they are so owned by the google and apple.
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What, are you too cool for a Huawei phone? ;)
google and apple
Again this is fine if we're not concerned with the NSA stealing our coin, but privacy larps that use Cake/Monero would shit a kitten to know they're broadcasting telemetry that is not protected by Pandora's box.
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My first thought whilst reading this whole Thread was... Hey... That p40 sitting in a drawer might have found itself a new usage.
But I recognise the risks.
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At first I interpreted that as the handgun model like bro it'll be ok
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🤣🤣 hello darkness my old friend 🤣🤣
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I actually assumed that Huawei's ran android, but upon looking it up just now, I learn that they run HarmonyOS. So I guess there are three stock OS options out there.
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militarized network zone Could you explain more about this?
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Here's a good article what a DMZ is in the context of internet services, basically running them behind a firewall with whitelist-only rules for those services such that the internet can reach them
But since your "cold" storage isn't an internet facing service in and of itself, you wouldn't put it in the DMZ...
You'd put it in a 3rd zone, a private network where the DMZ sits between it and the internet... in the DMZ you might have another Bitcoin node that's only job is to do p2p traffic with the rest of the network. Your militarized zone is firewalled off from your DMZ and your cold storage node can only communicate to that intermediate node to broadcast your transactions and get blocks.
TLDR; double-firewall.
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