2019-1-28 20:24 |
Smartphone hardware wallets could be the first step towards a new way of interacting with digital assets. Since smartphones spread all over the world and market penetration is very high in several countries, cryptocurrencies could be able to expand with the help of these devices.
Back in 2018, Samsung explained that their smartphones and devices are ‘the best approach to short-term and medium-term storage” for digital assets and their private keys. However, it is always important to make an analysis on the matter and understand whether smartphones are the best devices to hold large sums of virtual currencies.
Cryptocurrency storage is something that has been always debated. There are many different kinds of wallets available in the market. We have hot wallets, hardware wallets and several versions of these solutions.
Trusted Execution Environments (TEE) play an important role in understanding whether this is the best solution to store digital assets in a secure way. Indeed, if these wallets are able to operate in an independent way from the OS from the smartphone, and the TEE can be only accessed using a secure API, then these wallets can be very secure.
Although they are very difficult to be compromised, they can also experience some security issues since they are exposed to a few potential attack vectors. If there is an application that has been infected, they might be able to make payments from the TEE when the user has access to these apps.
According to Matthew Green, a cryptography professor at the Johns Hopkins University, malware can wait until the user enters a password and make a transaction copying the password that the user wrote. Additionally, telephones are usually connected to the internet, which makes them even more vulnerable to these attacks.
HTC, for example, tried to fix some of these issues with the blockchain-powered phones Exodus. The company decided to use a second Operating System that runs in parallel with Android. In the case of the Exodus phone, the Zion hardware wallet is integrated with it. That means that it should be completely immune to exploits.
There are different smartphones such as the XPhone, created by Pundi X, this device uses a blockchain-based OS based on blockchain technology. The XPhone uses legacy cellular networks but it also has a blockchain feature for more privacy.
Blockchain technology is already having an influence on the smartphone market. In the future, there might be more innovative solutions that are going to help users store their digital currencies in a secure way just on their smartphones. Eventually, this would help cryptocurrencies to expand all over the world in an easier way.
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