Disclaimer: I work for a hardware wallet company. The point of this thread is a healthy discussion, not to talk down certain projects or people.

In the recent years we've seen a huge influx of projects utilizing commodity hardware like the raspberry pi series to build nodes and hardware wallets. The reasoning for using commodity hardware is that there are less supply chain risks associated with them, because the retailer doesn't know what you are going to do with it. They can't just place a backdoor into every raspberry pi zero, hoping someone will generate a bitcoin wallet on it. This is certainly true!

But doesn't the risk just shift from the hardware supply chain to the software supply chain? Because the hardware can be flashed with any image, accidentally downloading the wrong image / compiling the wrong repository could present a very serious security threat. This also assumes the host device that's used for flashing has to be trusted, as it could theoretically flash another compromised image in the background.

What do you think? Am I too paranoid?