Exactly a month ago (9–10 September 2017), we and our friends from Slush Pool participated in the Breaking Bitcoin conference in Paris. This technical conference, while inspired by the well-known Scaling Bitcoin events, is somewhat unique thanks to its community-driven nature. Where Scaling Bitcoin mostly focuses on improving technical aspects of Bitcoin, Breaking Bitcoin’s central theme is analyzing weaknesses of Bitcoin and proposing cures for potential attacks. Breaking Bitcoin is also one of those few conferences with a great and rebellious atmosphere, where you could meet most active members of Bitcoin community in very high concentration. This was also the main reason why we became one of its proud partners.

Naturally, we primarily focused on the talks concerning wallet and hardware security, which culminated in the hardware wallet panel discussion between Marek Palatinus (Slush) from TREZOR, Nicolas Bacca from Ledger and Thomas Bertani Oraclize.

The debate revealed that the main difference between TREZOR and other hardware wallets is the strict open-source approach across the whole stack. As Marek explained: “Mostly for philosophical reasons, we don’t plan to use any proprietary virtualization or secure enclaves because we are trying to be as much transparent and open as possible.” He also indicated plans to use more processors for physical separation of the code at different trust levels.

The transparent nature of TREZOR resurfaced again when the question about chip suppliers as the main vulnerability was asked. TREZOR’s hardware design is already open now, and Marek revealed that we have already started researching RISC-V open hardware chips, which would philosophically fit into our open approach. This would mean shifting away from current STM chips.