Gavin Andresen - 2011-02-26 18:01:42

I've been thinking a lot and trying to educate myself on best practices for securing the bitcoin wallet.

Part of the solution could be a smart card that supports ECDSA; the PKCS #11 standard supports elliptic key crypto, so it is feasible to have a hardware token that stores your private keys and never lets them out of the token.

If the token includes some type of biometric identification (e.g. built-in fingerprint reader or mechanism for entering a password) then there is no way for the trojan to spoof new transactions.

But [mike] is right-- if your computer is infected by a trojan the trojan can just rewrite the bitcoin address and amount before the software asks the hardware token to sign the payment transaction.  The only way to prevent that is if the hardware token can somehow display the transaction details independent of the infected computer.  That's one very sophisticated hardware token...

Hopefully Hal and bitcoinex will now tell us how all this was solved years ago and how an iPhone app synchronized with a dumb-ish smart card can use smart crypto to make it all work....