My Trezor is broken!

[IIIIIIIII#VIP#IIIIIIIII]

@IIIIIIIII#VIP#IIIIIIIII
No offence, but where do you keep your Trezor wallet? It seems to be in an awful condition. It is all worn out. Like if you just took it out of a swamp. Is it the low quality picture or is it really messed up?

Apart from the fact that he is wearing electrical tape, everything else is ok. But this, as I said, was a necessary measure. I just didn't have a similar cable to replace it. I had to use the means at hand.

Regarding its "awful condition", it is not. I didn’t even take off the transparent film that was on top of it. Probably because of her, and it seems that he does not look quite normal. 

[Husna QA]

@Husna QA - your last tip turned out to be the cherry on the cake !  -snip-

Glad to see that your Trezor problem has been resolved. And as you have seen for yourself, even though the USB port type is the same, but not all USB cables have the same quality and function, mainly when used to transfer data.

Make sure the cable has a data wire connected. Some charger cables use only +5V and GND wires.

-snip- I had a similar problem - after two years of operation, I noticed that my Trezor starts working intermittently - the contact was regularly disconnected, and in order to make it work normally without the need to constantly correct his position, I was forced to used the electrical tape. I wound it tightly in the place where device was connected to the cable and for about a year my trezor has been working properly. -snip-

The problem means the USB port is loose due to a mismatched cable. You must be more careful to use it so as not to cause further damage to the Trezor which could occur due to electric short circuit. Maybe you should already consider purchasing a new hardware wallet for backups :) .

[HCP]

I've been thinking some more about this - does anyone know if the U2F is compatible between different hardware wallets? You can restore the Trezor U2F to other Trezors, and you can restore the Ledger U2F to other Ledgers, but I've never tried to restore from one device to the other. Given that there are no open source third party tools you can use to restore your seed phrase to recover your U2F like you can do with bitcoin wallets, if you cannot restore to other devices that it puts you in a precarious situation of being entirely dependent on that one company. If that company goes bankrupt, or you are unable to obtain a replacement wallet from them for another reason, then you could find yourself locked out of your accounts.

If U2F is not cross-compatible, then there is a strong argument to made to always have a second device as a back up stored somewhere secure in the event of loss or failure of your first device.

I ran a quick test this morning using my Ledger Nano S and Trezor... they are both using the same seed.

I initially setup U2F authentication on a dummy dropbox account with the Ledger Nano S, then signed out. When I attempted to log back in with the Trezor attached I got an "unknown device" error
and was unable to proceed.


For completeness I added the Trezor key (dropbox lets you have multiple security keys attached to your account), then removed the Ledger Key... logged out and tried to log back in with the Ledger Key... and got the same message. So, DropBox sees them as 2 unique keys.

Based on this quick and hardly thorough test, it would seem to suggest that the U2F is not cross-compatible between different brands of device, even with the same seed.

[o_e_l_e_o]

Based on this quick and hardly thorough test, it would seem to suggest that the U2F is not cross-compatible between different brands of device, even with the same seed.

Thanks for doing that. It does raise the question of "Why are they different?" Obviously the same seed on a Trezor or on a Ledger will restore the same bitcoin or altcoin wallets, and U2F is an open source industry standard, so there is no reason that they shouldn't be cross-compatible. Are they using different versions of U2F maybe?

It does highlight the risky situation you leave yourself in if you use a hardware wallet as 2FA, though. If the manufacturer of the hardware wallet disappears or goes bankrupt, then you have no way of obtaining a replacement device and could potentially lose access to the protected accounts indefinitely. Based on this, I would not recommend using a hardware wallet as 2FA unless you have a second identical make and model in your possession as a back up.

[HCP]

I suspect it is using some other identifier in addition to the key generated from the seed, perhaps a hardware or device ID of some description that is unique to the Ledger or Trezor firmware?

[1GUARDIAN]

For completeness I added the Trezor key (dropbox lets you have multiple security keys attached to your account), then removed the Ledger Key... logged out and tried to log back in with the Ledger Key... and got the same message. So, DropBox sees them as 2 unique keys.

Based on this quick and hardly thorough test, it would seem to suggest that the U2F is not cross-compatible between different brands of device, even with the same seed.

Probably the U2F protocol implies that the technical characteristics of the U2F key (its brand and manufacturer) must be the same in order to satisfy the protocol. And this is entirely logical, because it is thanks to this that increased security is achieved when using these keys.

It would probably be surprising if you could recover your key using a seed phrase using any device of this kind produced by different manufacturers. The fact that the dropbox sees these keys as if they are different is our additional guarantee in case someone becomes the owner of our seed phrase and wants to restore the key on another device without knowing about this feature.

I wonder if there are any exceptions to this rule? Maybe among the whole variety of keys from different manufacturers, there are still some that would be interchangeable with respect to each other.

It would be interesting if someone did such a large-scale study.

By the way, I recently had a situation where I was trying to register my Trezor One as a two-factor authentication key for my new email on gmail.com.

I don't remember exactly what kind of browser it was - either safari or chrome, but during the registration process, a window popped up that Google wanted to scan my key type. And I refused to give Google this right by clicking the corresponding button.

And to my surprise, after this, i could not complete the registration of my Trezor as a two-factor authentication key. Perhaps precisely because I refused to provide information about the parameters of my device.

I don't know - maybe it was some kind of exception to the rule, or maybe it's some kind of new Google policy regarding authentication keys, because earlier, as far as I remember - about two months ago, when I registered my Trezor in this way - everything was ok.

[HCP]

I don't remember exactly what kind of browser it was - either safari or chrome, but during the registration process, a window popped up that Google wanted to scan my key type. And I refused to give Google this right by clicking the corresponding button.

And to my surprise, after this, i could not complete the registration of my Trezor as a two-factor authentication key. Perhaps precisely because I refused to provide information about the parameters of my device.

Why would this surprise you? It's like acting surprised that you don't see any video if you deny access to your webcam If you don't grant permission for the browser to be able to talk to the USB device, how is the USB device meant to communicate to the website?


On another note, something I found somewhat interesting was that during my experimenting with the dropbox 2FA security keys, originally a Windows/Microsoft authentication dialog popped up when I was trying to add a security key... so, it was trying to use some sort of Windows/Microsoft account based authentication... I could use my Windows 10 "PIN" as my 2FA key??!? Once I removed that, and then cancelled that dialog on the next attempt to setup a 2fa security key, it then moved to using the hardware key.