Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: Bitcoin Wallet Security
by
Blazr
on 19/07/2015, 06:05:37 UTC
One of the biggest problems with bitcoin is security.

I would like to see developed a new Bitcoin Desktop wallet that gave the option to its users of enabling 2FA security.
The company who develops this will be surely a winner...
Am I wrong or is there someone already working on it?

Yes you can do that. If we just simply added 2FA to the wallet software that would be no good, it would be very simple to bypass. You need use multisig, a service like greenaddress holds one of the private keys for your multisig wallet and co-signs each transaction after you auth with them using 2FA. Electrum already has plugins for various services that do this.

The security of 2FA is often over-hyped and many people are using it as a sort of catch-all security measure which is insanely stupid. Instead of using strong passwords and good security practices, many people just turn on 2FA and assume they are now impossible to hack. Even if you do use 2FA you cannot prevent the malware from modifying your transaction. You might think you are sending to some bitcoin address but a sneaky piece of malware could very easily change that address to the hackers one without your knowledge. Existing 2FA systems cannot protect against that kind of thing.  TOTP 2FA which is what Google Authenticator and almost everything else uses was designed to try and figure out if the account owner is the person behind the keyboard, it wasn't really designed to prevent you from any kind of hacking or malware, if your computer is hacked or infected then it is useless, it does nothing to stop the hacker at all in that situation.
Exactly. Someone with access to the computer can go find the wallet file and brute force it to steal the private keys. 2fa will do nothing to stop that.

Using 2fa with a third party would work but requires you to trust said third party. You need to trust them to let you to spend your bitcoin otherwise they could lock the bitcoin up in the multi sig address. Also, what happens if they go out of business?

Normally how these services work is you set up a 2 of 3 multisig wallet, you keep one key on your PC, they keep one key and you keep the final key on paper. Should they refuse to co-sign or go out of business you can use your paper backup to regain access to your coins.