COMMSEC: HWallet: The Simple Cryptocurrency Hardware Wallet

Last year we witnessed a huge leap in value for many cryptocurrencies, which attracted much interest from the hacking community to try and find vulnerabilities in various hardware and software used for storing private keys. Even the most secure, so-called hardware wallets, had to be patched after certain vulnerabilities were discovered. The current problems that hardware wallets are coping with are dependencies on many software libraries, hardware designs that either include components under an NDA and thus firmware cannot be fully open source or single insecure microcontroller solutions that require running a complex USB stack alongside the code that protects private keys

This talk will try to address these issues and explore an alternative approach for building hardware wallets, which can deliver more secure and convenient devices in the future, by introducing a design based on the most secure microcontroller that does not require an NDA, allows anyone to build their own hardware wallet for storing cryptocurrencies. Expandable modular code approach is supposed to motivate the community to implement further cryptocurrencies and the GPL license requires anyone trying to commercialize it to publish their full source code.

Location: Date: November 28, 2018 Time: 3:00 pm - 3:30 pm Nemanja Nikodijevic