Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] Hardware Wallet Standard

From: Corey Haddad <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 28 Aug 2016 16:14:03 -0700

*One of my biggest fears about using any wallet is the "whoops, cosmic ray
flipped a bit while producing receiving address; SFYL!" possibility. For
high value cold storage, I always generate my addresses on two independent
machines using two different pieces of software. Am I nuts for doing that?*
A randomly flipped bit would be extremely unlikely to yield a valid
address, however, I still think it you are wise to use independent routes
to confirm that your addresses match the keys.  I do the same when I
generating my cold storage key pairs.  I think malicious address
substitution is an under appreciated attack vector.

Regarding this thread in general, would it make sense for this proposal to
include standards for multi-sig wallet interoperability?  A whole spectrum
of attacks would be made less likely - and easy for typical users to guard
against - by using wallets on separate devices AND where the wallet
software was written and provided by different parties.

On Mon, Aug 22, 2016 at 9:50 AM, Moral Agent via bitcoin-dev <
[email-masked]> wrote:

> It would be nice if the detached signer and the normal wallet could both
> verify the correctness of generated addresses before you cause coins to be
> sent there.
>
> e.g. the hardware wallet could give its master public key to Bitcoin Core
> and you can thereafter generate your receiving addresses on Core, with the
> option to have the HW wallet validate them.
>
> One of my biggest fears about using any wallet is the "whoops, cosmic ray
> flipped a bit while producing receiving address; SFYL!" possibility. For
> high value cold storage, I always generate my addresses on two independent
> machines using two different pieces of software. Am I nuts for doing that?
>
> With the above scheme, you are pretty well protected from losing money if
> your HW wallet is defective. You could still lose it if the HW wallet was
> evil of course, but that strikes me as much more likely to be discovered
> quickly.
>
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