On the other hand, the attack surface of an iPhone is huge compared to a dedicated hardware wallet, and it's hard to keep it in airplane mode and actually transact your coins.
replyYou can use QR codes or USB sticks to sign offline transactions, same as with a hardware wallet.
replyWhy is it harder to implant?
replyThe hardware is much more sophisticated, miniaturized, and high-speed, and the supply chain is much more generic; a Ledger is a really primitive piece of hardware with a simple display interface and a ton of empty space inside it. An iPhone has no wasted space and extremely high-speed onboard buses that would be hard to sniff. Additionally, with Ledger, you know that every customer is going to be using the device to access crypto, so it's an easy target nearer the head of the supply chain. With an iPhone, you have no idea what end-user to target the implant against.
replyI'm going to guess it's a number's game, you might be able to do it with an iPhone but it's not guaranteed to go to a crypto user, whereas the other one is a bespoke system for the purpose.
replyYou can walk in to an official Apple store and buy an iphone direct almost anywhere in the world. Crypto thieves would have to have compromised the entirety of Apple's supply chain and found space inside the iphone to fit a whole spy chip (of which there is basically none).
replyOr just a single apple store sales employee...
replyright, so you'd have to know the store with your victims upfront, know which ones to give these highly expensive implanted iPhones to (or have a lot of units), be able to always bring enough for the specific colors the customers want....
replyI'm especially amused at all the different iPhone SKUs you'd have to stock your crooked phone salesman with. 4 storage tiers, Pro and Pro Max, and 4 colors. So that's 32 boxed phones, a good-sized duffel bag full, to smuggle into the Apple Store, to keep on-hand but avoid anyone finding them, in anticipation of the victim's visit, just to cover the Pro range. Imagine you spent $75,000 on those phones and about as much on the technicians' time to open them all up, install the implants, and perfectly re-seal them. Your salesman has successfully kept the phones hidden for a month, and the target walks into that store and says "You know, I really like the color the non-pro model has this year."
replyI presume because iPhones have a secure TPM and nobody is targeting them for crypto supply chain attacks.
replyHow about if you build your own airgapped hw wallet? There should be plenty folks here who would be capable of doing so. (Doesn't even have to be the most hardened and audited implementation ever since you won't release this to anybody.) This makes you vulnerable to purely very targetted attacks.
replyAs long as the cost of sucha single-target attack isn't substantially below its potential upside, you should be safe.
Otoh, it's only meaningful if you have more than just toy assets in there.
There should be a range between those two though that would contain lots of folks comfortably.
> How about if you build your own airgapped hw wallet?
replyAlso known as buying a laptop, removing the WiFi card, and putting stock Ubuntu on it.
Yeah, the problem with "crypto hardware wallets" is the same as the problem with "secure phones for drug dealers" - they are an extremely juicy targets, you KNOW that any user of them is your target.
"crypto-experts"
reply