Secure Element in Hardware Wallets

[casperBGD]

Interestingly, phishing websites almost never ask you for your passphrase, only for 24 words of your seed phrase.

That could be an intentional thing. The passphrase is considered an advanced feature. That means that newbies and those that don't feel comfortable enough to experiment with passphrases most likely don't have one either. It also means that if you know what a passphrase is, and you took the little time that is needed to set one up, you are unlikely to be gullible enough to insert your seed phrase in a fake wallet.

agree on this, it is for complete newbies, they could enter their seed phrase in fake wallet, if you done some research, you should probably know that you should not do that
with that said, when I created my first block.io account, I did this because BTC wallets seem so complicated to use, and web wallet was easy to use, and these days I also think that ETH and tokens have much more user friendly usage and experience in wallets (no matter type) than BTC, maybe that is due to nature of the system, or the way the BTC records transactions, but I find it really hard to call me familiar for everyday use, while for ETH the process is linear, or that is just the matter of habit

[dkbit98]

Added new hardware wallet Tangem with EAL6+ Samsung SecureCore microchip and like all other manufacturers they say their chip is the best
They have open source software development kit for their android and iOS mobile devices:
https://github.com/Tangem

[Max_Headroom]

I just came about this open source project based on SmartCard-HSM called smartbtc

smartbtc
http://smartbtc.eu/index.html

the SmartCard-HSM smartcard hardware manufacture
https://www.smartcard-hsm.com/features.html

[dkbit98]

Added one more hardware wallet ImKey that claims to have EAL 6+ Military-grade CC security chip, but I can't find much information about it and it's not possible to confirm exact chip model and manufacturers.
Looks like it is made in China and their twitter social media account is not active since 2019, and having secure element does not have to mean that hardware wallet is better or safer than other wallets.

[dkbit98]

Wookong Chinese hardware wallets also have secure element but it is currently one of the lowest graded EAL4+ chip from all known hardware wallets.
I could not find and verify what exactly microchip they are using but on their website they claim it is fully secured and not half secure like Ledger wallet, but not much data or explanation is provided.
Everything looks closed source in this case, and I would stay away from this product.

One more hardware wallet added is Hashwallet with EAL 6+ Infineon SLE78 secure element.
Similar Infinion chips manufacturer is used for Secux, Keevo and Jubiter hardware wallets.

[dkbit98]

Interesting update regarding Cobo vault hardware wallet after I asked them to provide identification for their secure element, and they refused to do it.
Nick Johnson opened, bypassed their tamper protection mechanism and examined it's inside with secure element.
As main chip they are using Mediatek MT6850 but they lasered off identification marks from secure element chip in effort to hide this information from people!
Nick managed to enter criteria in supplier database and came up with potential candidate MAX36010-BSN-T  as security supervisor from Maxim.

We can't be 100% certain, but I am updating information and adding this as probable secure element for Cobo vault.

Common Cobo, you can't hide things like this forever  



Full source report is very interesting to read. (archive)

[HCP]

Full source report is very interesting to read. (archive)

The ending slayed me!

... this device will be a viable alternative to the Ledger and Trezor, with a much nicer UI that seems likely to be further improved.

Which is a shame, because the one I have appears to be non-functional and in pieces.

Bwhahaha...


I love the way people think "outside the box" (if you'll pardon the pun ) like this:

I took my Vault to my local Veterinarian, and asked them to XRay it for me.

That's genius!

[dkbit98]

One small update regarding secure element chip ATECC608A that is used in ColdCard, BitBox and Passport hardware wallets.

This secure element is mostly used by Amazon and it is good for their services, but let's say it is not very smart when we are talking about Bitcoin and it doesn't know how to create a Bitcoin signature.
When you sign a transaction on device with ATECC608A, secret needs to be moved to other stm32 memory chip, sign a transaction and then secret should be cleared from stm32 memory.
That means that secret is leaving secure element and this can in theory be abused by some attackers in future, but something like this has not done so far.

This can probably be applied to some Infineon secure element chips that Amazon uses, but I can't be totally sure about that.
There is a lot of room for improvements in using secure element chips in hardware wallets and I expect next few years will be very interesting for inovations.

[DaveF]

...
When you sign a transaction on device with ATECC608A, secret needs to be moved to other stm32 memory chip, sign a transaction and then secret should be cleared from stm32 memory...

Was thinking about something similar the other day and this probably unworkable thought came into my head.
And entire secure wallet on a single chip. Create some custom spun chip with everything you need on the one chip.

Would eliminate a few attack vectors, but might add some more.

Was watching a youtube video about a company that built a custom piece of hardware for medical data pad for harsh environments, was essentially a custom android tablet with a HDMI connector but EVERYTHING was in 1 chip. RAM / ROM / Flash Memory, CPU, video processor, etc all in the one chip.

Any thoughts?

-Dave

[ranochigo]

And entire secure wallet on a single chip. Create some custom spun chip with everything you need on the one chip.

Would eliminate a few attack vectors, but might add some more.

Was watching a youtube video about a company that built a custom piece of hardware for medical data pad for harsh environments, was essentially a custom android tablet with a HDMI connector but EVERYTHING was in 1 chip. RAM / ROM / Flash Memory, CPU, video processor, etc all in the one chip.

Probably won't help much, if at all. There isn't any proprietary secure elements being produced by any hardware wallet manufacturers. Designing one and manufacturing them would probably make the cost of one skyrocket, not to mention that smashing that many components into a single chip isn't common at all.

Communication between secure element and the MCU should be encrypted and if anything were to be extracted. AFAIK, some MCUs actually wipe their memory on bootup, even if the user doesn't do a clean shutdown. Would be better to just use a SE that allows for transactions to be signed within that, so keys are never sent out of it.

[dkbit98]

Was thinking about something similar the other day and this probably unworkable thought came into my head.
And entire secure wallet on a single chip. Create some custom spun chip with everything you need on the one chip.

Would eliminate a few attack vectors, but might add some more.

Was watching a youtube video about a company that built a custom piece of hardware for medical data pad for harsh environments, was essentially a custom android tablet with a HDMI connector but EVERYTHING was in 1 chip. RAM / ROM / Flash Memory, CPU, video processor, etc all in the one chip.

Any thoughts?

This is impossible to have today as secure elements are simple and stupid with only one purpose, so we need to have two chips for this to work.
Some wallets like Trezor or Jade have only one chip but they don't have secure element.

Good news is that Trezor team is making their own open source secure element that will be a gamechanger compared with all solutions we have at the moment.
There will be no need for secret NDAs and closed source bs.

[Coin-Keeper]

Good news is that Trezor team is making their own open source secure element that will be a gamechanger compared with all solutions we have at the moment.
There will be no need for secret NDAs and closed source bs.

That really sounds good to me!

[bob123]

This is impossible to have today as secure elements are simple and stupid with only one purpose, so we need to have two chips for this to work.

It is not impossible per se.
A single chip itself is a set of electronic circuits. And it is not abnormal for a chip to have several sub-components. It is very well imaginable that one of these sub-components can be a secure element itself.
That's like a "bigger" chip being made of "smaller chips". Nothing too uncommon.

When we are talking about Chips or Microchips we are actually already talking about a set of components, all the time.

[DaveF]

...
When we are talking about Chips or Microchips we are actually already talking about a set of components, all the time.

Exactly what I was thinking. Much like what I was saying is that someone took an established CPU design and then just added what you would normally see elsewhere on a board and combined it all onto 1 die package. Made for a smaller board and only put on what they needed.

-Dave

[dkbit98]

That really sounds good to me!

Yes and according to recent news Tropic Square received 4 million euros from Swiss company Auzera for creating first ever open source security chip TASSIC that should be released by the end of 2022.
This is a game changer for sure and I hope other manufacturers will follow them because it's always good to have healthy competition.

[Pmalek]

According to the article, TASSIC is expected to be used in Trezor devices, meaning the company is looking to completely change their security concept. Getting rid of the seed extraction vulnerability with physical access to Trezor hardware wallets will be achieved in this way. Only time will tell if the approach of having a publicly available codebase for the secure element was the right decision. I hope the chip will be tested thoroughly even if it means extending the ETA. We certainly don't need new bad press in the hardware wallet department. I also expect it to be a more expensive device compared to hardware wallets with older chips.  

[dkbit98]

List of secure elements is updated with new hardware wallet OneKey with HSC32I1 secure element, they claim it's EAL 6+ certified, however on hsec website I found this chip is EAL 4+ certified.
Interesting thing about this chip is that it is made for Huawei after United States imposed a ban on their devices, so Hongsi Electronics created fully compatible clone to replace ATSHA204A chip, using same SHA-256 algorithm with few more added.
OneKey wallet is using HSC32I1 as secondary chip used for holding secrets, along with their main STM32 chip.

[Max_Headroom]

**Trezor is working on their own fully open source Secure Element chip and they started separate project for this purpose called Tropic Square.

That sounds great, I maybe going to buy a Trezor because of it.. 
Any news about it? Information like what FPGA development board? what Hardware Description Language plataform etc..

Just curious ..

[dkbit98]

That sounds great, I maybe going to buy a Trezor because of it..  
Any news about it? Information like what FPGA development board? what Hardware Description Language plataform etc..

Don't expect to see this new Trezor hardware wallet released before late 2022, and I listened to one podcast with Trezor team explaining that it's technically nearly impossible to make 100% open source chip so fast,
and final product will have to wait, but important thing is they have required funding of 4 million euros.
Maybe you can learn more about it from this podcast with Vlad Costea and Slush, and follow @tropicsquare twitter channel for more news:
https://bitcoin-takeover.com/s8-e8-slush-on-trezor-and-tropic-square/

[Max_Headroom]

but important thing is they have required funding of 4 million euros.

It reminds me professor Andrew S. Tanenbaum about European grants for developing a new tech  Sounds like the market price in 2014 plus inflation

Andrew S. Tanenbaum: The Impact of MINIX (~ 6 minutes 50 seconds)
https://youtu.be/86_BkFsb4eI?t=386