I have a question for the devs:
I'm trying to understand the potential security vulnerabilities of Electrum. I have read every resource I can find online, but I can't find a reference to one of my biggest questions:
1. Is the electrum.dat file vulnerable?
2. Does a user need to protect access to this file with the same degree of care as the bitcoin-QT's wallet.dat?
3. If an attacker were to access electrum.dat, would the attacker be able to transfer funds and impersonate the victim?
Thanks.
The wallet file, which can be electrum.dat in older versions, contains your electrum seed which is needed to spend your coins. If you chose to set a password when you installed electrum the seed is encrypted before being written to disk. In that scenario if someone were to get their hands on your wallet file they would first need to decrypt it before they could spend the coins or sign messages using your private keys. If you haven't set a password then they wouldn't have to do that.