What Makes Keystone One of The Best Hardware Wallet on The Solana Blockchain?

With the collapse of FTX, many high profile individuals and government entities have publicly raised concerns about the transparency of Centralized Cryptocurrency Exchanges.

The words “self-custody” have suddenly been thrusted into the spotlight. People are scrambling to grab hold of a hardware wallet which plays a critical part in helping them protect their digital assets.

So what is a hardware wallet?

The hardware wallet is a dedicated device where you can store your digital assets and also use it to sign various on-chain transactions. Since hardware wallets usually operate offline without any internet connection, it can safely generate and store your private key. The device also helps you to greatly minimize your attack vectors when compared against other devices such as laptops or mobile phones which remain constantly connected to the internet.

However, having your digital assets in a hardware wallet doesn’t mean that they’re fully protected. You, as the owner of the device, have to also be careful and ensure you’re up to date and educated with the latest security trends to prevent yourself from falling prey to scams.

The Blind Signing Issue

Resource: Unsplash

Let’s talk about the elephant in the room, Blind signing.

Blind signing means confirming a blockchain-based smart contract transaction that you don’t know the full details of — something that has become common in crypto due to ‘ape-ing’ nature of its participants.

This is a serious security risk as you are requesting and giving permission to your hardware wallet to trust an external software to be genuine and to feed non-malicious commands and messages for it to sign. If that’s the case, what’s the point of purchasing a hardware wallet right?

Remember — Don’t Trust, Always Verify

One of the most basic fundamental security practices to owning a hardware wallet is that you should not trust any external software. You should always manually check the contract/transaction details displayed on your hardware wallet before approving it, to confirm you are not approving any malicious action.

Now, let’s take a closer look at what Keystone has built and how traditional hardware wallets are still in the ‘stone age’ and constantly promoting blind signing on the Solana blockchain.

Keystone’s Solution For Solana Users

Firstly, big kudos to the Solflare Wallet team! Without their help, this won’t have been possible.

Keystone integrated with the Solflare Wallet to ensure support for all signing scenarios including transfer, stake, swap, swap on Dapps, message signing etc. on the Solana blockchain.

Let’s use token swapping in the example below.

Swapping tokens via an AMM is the most common action that users do on a daily basis. During a swap transaction, a “transfer” method will be initiated which includes both “from address”, “to address” and the corresponding “amount”.

Here comes the risky part — Blind signing a transaction

Assuming your computer/software has been compromised, hackers can easily change the “to address” into their own and steal your funds. This entire process can go completely unnoticed if you enable blind signing on your hardware wallet.

Here is what it looks like:

As you can see, only a Message Hash (an unreadable string of characters) will be displayed on the device. The user will never know the details of the transaction he/she is approving, putting them at serious risk.

Keystone’s solution:

Our device decodes the transaction message hash into a human readable format. It will display all the information (“From address”, “To address” and “Amount” etc) clearly on the 4-inch touchscreen and prompt users to manually check them before signing off on it.

To protect our users, Keystone currently covers transaction decoding for various scenarios on the Solana blockchain i.e. Transfer, Native SOL Staking, Dapp Connection etc.

Below is a table comparing what Keystone displays vs other traditional hardware wallets:

Unfortunately, blind signing is an ubiquitous phenomenon that still exists in the Web 3 space. However the team at Keystone is very optimistic that it will be eliminated one day.

Click here to learn more about blind signing.