Greetings All,
As for favorite dApp-friendly light wallet for security, I give no preference to any and assume that all of them are backdoored. For this reason, I never started purchasing ADA until Cardano started supporting the Ledger Nano S. All my life’s savings is in crypto. For this reason I also assume that my computer monitor, keyboard, mother board, WiFi, Bluetooth, BIOs, OS have also been hacked. Then I imagine that there are camera’s and microphones all over my house and in my clothing. I consider my phone, smart watch, and bluetooth earbuds under the control of the CIA and Organized Crime, and I don’t trust my Nano S either. All that said, I feel my funds are much safer in my custody than in the bank or with any other centralized entity.
If I use a Nano S then nothing on my computer can see my private keys. So as long as I check that what the Nano S says matches exactly what my computer says, and that this is what I intend, then I know my hacked computer can not steal my funds.
Still, how do I know that the 24 words generated by the Nano are really random? I don’t! Maybe the Ledger company knew exactly what 24 words it was going to give me. So I use a very long and completely random 25th word that I chose myself as the salt. What if the Nano is making it’s own salt and ignoring my 25th word? For this reason I check that the same 25 words in a Trezor will give me the same results. So that would stop my hacked Nano from stealing except of course for the radio inside that is trying to transmit my 24 words and the 25th word to my phone, and my phone is trying to send it to North Korea. That’s why my phone is in the microwave oven when I am working with crypto.
Anything we can do to make it harder to steal our own crypto makes the entire community stronger. That’s why I shared the open source www.privatekeyvault.com. The next time I build one of these I am going to set it up using the procedure show at The Frankenwallet | COSD
I don’t think any of these precautions will stop a determined criminal or government from stealing my funds but fortunately there are much bigger accounts to hack so that gives me some comfort.
In any case, I feel I need to do all these things when working with crypto and I still think that my life’s savings is safer than in the bank where I know that at least 10% of my money is stolen every year by my government through inflation, so I’ll take my chances with self custody.