Hardware wallet (Ledger Nano S) for Steemit: how will it work?
We have 4 different keys on Steemit and we need a secure way to deal with them. One option is to use hardware wallet to do so, but none of them support Steem... yet. Steemit uses the same underlying mathematics as Bitcoin(same elliptic curve) so it should not be (so) hard to adapt the ledger Nano S to support Steemit.
My proposal
Remember the keys are computed this way: secret = SHA256( account + role + password ). The password will be replaced by the seed with the ledger Nano S.
I think it could work the following way for the 4 keys:
Owner Key
This key should be derived from the seed and not leave the device. This Key can be changed (following the bip39/44 ) as usual.
Active Key
For paranoiacs, this key could stay on the Nano. I would be OK if I could store it on my PC, since you need it to promote your posts. If you don't promote your posts and don't transfer Steem/SBD so often, you can have it only on the Nano.
So, for this key, it would be nice to leave the choice to the users.
Posting Key
It would be a pain if you need to have the Nano connected all the time you use this one, since you need it to vote or comment. This key would definitely need to be extractable .
Ideas/comments
Do you think it could/should work in a way different than what I laid out?
To proceed I need:
- Info/documentation on the Nano (github/reddit)
- Ledger Nano S (I have a personal one but for testing I would prefer to use another one. Better be safe than sorry)
- For a future version, the ledger blue
- code and testing on the hardware
- code and testing on the user interface
Alone, I think roughly it would take me about a month to complete it. But I won't have so much free time for a while. If anyone else is interested, let me know.
@cryptohazard some news about this???
Nope didn't do much since I thought about it. I am supposed to look at it now.
I need to buy a ledger just for development, see what is possible to do then change my proposal that I don't like anymore (too dumb ).
I will make a more details post sometimes soon.
Someone did it with a trezor: https://steemit.com/steem/@svk/trezor-hackathon-putting-steem-on-the-trezor
I think this would be a very useful tool @cryptohazard
Unfortunately all I can really do is cheer from the side line...
Anyway, you have my support and wishing you the best in pulling it off!
thanks for commenting. What I need is more people to voice their interest, then with some luck, more people will join me to develop this. :-)
Yes @cryptohazard please let me know how you go with it I'm really interested and would love a steem hardware wallet!
I know it would be awesome, but I have to spend some time looking at the code and I didn't get enough feedback to know how feasible it is. Maybe I will look at it some time in July.
is there already something on the move regarding this?
I first need feedback from the Steemians and/or the ledger dev to see if what I propose can work.
Then I can start to work on it but it will be pretty slow if I am alone on that. So not really much work on it in the meantime.