A man, called Ben Geskin, published a photo of Samsung Galaxy S10 on Twitter as early as January 23. The most eye-catching thing in the photo was two lines of large blue words on the screen — “Welcome to Samsung Blockchain KeyStore”. Then many people believed that it was the signal that Samsung wanted to regain its mobile phone market share with the help of the blockchain technology. However, Samsung did not respond to it.

One month has passed in the twinkling of an eye. On February 21, 2019, Samsung held a new product launch event in San Francisco — the basecamp of Apple Inc., including the debut of Samsung Galaxy S10 as the grand finale. However, the official description of Samsung Galaxy S10 mainly introduced the features of Samsung Galaxy S10 such as 8GB RAM, 256GB memory, “highly smart” camera shooting system and inductive charging, and it did not mention the new function — storing cryptocurrency. What trick did Samsung play this time?

Objective of Samsung

In recent years, the competition in the mobile phone market has become extraordinarily intense. Besides prices, appearances, performances and configuration, new technology and “black technology” have been becoming increasingly important selling points. As everyone knows, the number of Samsung mobile phone users has greatly decreased since the news on “Samsung grenade” (Samsung’s Galaxy Note 7) was published. Now the sales volume of Samsung mobile phones has become very low in China. According to the relevant reports, the market share of Samsung mobile phones in the Chinese mobile phone market has become less than 1%.

The review of this phone test is quite good. The outside world unanimously believes that Samsung Galaxy S10 has strengthened the weak points of Samsung mobile phones and it has been ready for regaining its market share. Samsung Galaxy S10 has not only improved the performances and configuration of Samsung mobile phones, but also gained a new important function — supporting BTC, ETH and other ETH-based ERC-20 Tokens.

It is reported that this phone supports all kinds of blockchain-based decentralized applications (DApp) as well as electronic currency storage and payment. As for blockchain lovers and electronic currency lovers, it should be very good news. If they use Samsung Galaxy S10, they can experience the use of Blockchain Wallet without downloading and installing the installation program. In addition, as a well-known star company, Samsung has done some work in the aspect of the blockchain, which benefits the whole blockchain industry. As everyone knows, a lean camel is bigger than a horse. Though the market share of Samsung has greatly decreased, the number of worldwide Samsung phone users is still numerous.

What is Blockchain Wallet?

Blockchain assets such as electronic currency innately have extremely high security. However, the premise is that the assets are correctly stored in the wallet. When a wallet is mentioned, your first impression of it must be a leather package used to hold money and bank cards.

With the economic development and the popularization of mobile phones, electronic wallets such as Alipay and WeChat Wallet, which are different from the traditional physical wallets, have appeared. Because all of us know much about Alipay and WeChat Wallet, I need not describe it any more.

In the previous years, after blockchain achieved some development, the demand for digital currency security and easy currency use increased and various blockchain wallets gradually appeared in the market. The wallets are not used to hold money. They are containers to hold secret keys, which are used to obtain the rights to use the digital currency. In short, Blockchain Wallet is a tool used to manage, use and deal in digital currency via secret keys.

After a wallet is created, the security keys, which can be used for digital signature, are generated, and hereby the public key and the wallet address are generated. The private key has uniqueness. Therefore, it must be kept well. Once it is lost, the right to control the wallet is lost. How to balance the relationship with the private key by using Samsung Galaxy S10 must be a challenge to Samsung.

It is worth mentioning that the Blockchain Wallet has been divided into two categories: cold wallets and hot wallets. A hot wallet refers to any cryptocurrency wallet that is connected to the internet. On the contrary, a cold wallet refers to any cryptocurrency wallet that is not connected to the internet. The security of the cold wallet is highest. It is almost impossible to steal the digital currency stored in the wallet. However, a cold wallet cannot be used as conveniently as a hot wallet.

Application of the TEE technology

The TEE technology Samsung now adopts is the core technology that the Trias team had deeply researched five years ago. TEE stands for Trusted Execution Environment. The environment guarantees that computing will not be interfered with by conventional systems. Therefore, it is called “trusted”. Broadly speaking, TEE is an independent execution environment that runs parallel with Rich OS and provides security services for the Rich OS environment. TEE is independent of Rich OS and other applications and it is used to access hardware and software security resources.

In summary, the technical idea of TEE is that “when sensitive operations or behaviors with high security are executed (e.g., fingerprint comparison, and payment via a private key or digital signature), the security level of the system that originally exists in the Normal World cannot deal with it, the system needs to be placed in the Secure World to provide a highly secure execution environment for a series of sensitive operations.”

In the previous application scenarios, when a user adopted a mobile payment method, a series of data such as the passwords, the transaction contents and the transaction amount are generated. The malicious code in the device may acquire the user’s passwords and change the transaction data such as the transaction amount without letting the user know it, or the malicious code may generate a transaction without the confirmation of the user. In some cases, even various behaviors may cause the information disclosure, property loss, etc. of the user.

By using the TEE technology, we can implant trusted chips in devices to provide a completely isolated running space, protect sensitive data from malicious behaviors of the other environments and strengthen the security features of mobile devices.

Nowadays, more and more large enterprises have begun to attach importance to the application of the TEE technology, which has proved from another angle that the prediction of Trias on the technical development direction is correct. We believe that Trias as a leader of the TEE technology will better build human and machine trust as the TEE technology is applied more widely.