Trezor touts strong protection against government attempts to hack wallets

The developers of the Trezor hardware wallet highlighted its resilience against attempts to breach wallet security as US authorities plan to build a tool to bypass protections and access crypto assets.

1/8 Efforts to oppress citizens and erode individuals’ rights to privacy, as we see here, are a great validator of Trezor’s open-source philosophy. Since the beginning, we have designed Trezor (both in hardware and software) to be as open as possible. https://t.co/Ith6lAbMIY

— Trezor (@Trezor) April 29, 2021

On 29 April, Vice reported that the IRS’s digital forensics division placed a tender for a universal solution to break into hardware wallets that could be of interest for investigations.

At present, experts are not able to effectively “trace movements of funds” or “confiscate millions and billions of dollars,” the agency says in a document.

Security expert Andrew Tierney questioned the feasibility of the IRS plans in comments to the publication.

«Hardware wallets are becoming quite secure. It may be possible to find vulnerabilities in some of them, but discovering ready-made exploits will be very difficult. Another problem is the absence of funds in the wallet itself. There are simply keys. The owner can move coins if they learn that access to the wallet may have been compromised», — he explained.

Nicolas Weaver, a senior research scientist at UC Berkeley, called the initiative an “overreach.” In his words, a wallet owner is faced with a choice: either the passphrase or a prison sentence.

The creator of the Trezor hardware wallets said that they follow the philosophy of open-source software development. According to the developers, this rules out any possibility of cooperating with authorities to add a secret hardware or software backdoor.

«Thousands of experts watch every move we make, checking every change to the code. It functions as an ideal faultless mechanism. No one would use a compromised version», — they explained.

Trezor stated that there is no 100% guarantee against hacking. They have implemented the BIP39 standard, by means of which a user can recover the wallet.

6/8 Even if a three-letter agency gets their hands on your device and extracts the passphrase-encrypted secret from it, they still cannot seize your coins unless you give them the corresponding passphrase.

— Trezor (@Trezor) April 29, 2021

Experts stressed that there may be many mnemonics that block access to coins. In Trezor they signed the so-called canary certificate. In a statement they said they did not collaborate with anyone on the software and did not implant backdoors.

Earlier, the IRS sent out letters to cryptocurrency holders demanding to settle large debts with the state.

In March 2021, the agency launched the operation “Hidden Treasure” to locate residents concealing income from cryptocurrency transactions.

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