Quote from: Pmalek on Today at 08:22:42 AM

Quote from: dkbit98 on May 08, 2022, 10:57:01 PM

Are you keeping money and keys for your money in monitors, mouses and chairs or not?

My point was that the computer, laptop, or phone you are using was made in China including all of its hardware components. You connect your hardware wallet to this China-made blackbox, access your financial, private data, work-related data, etc. You have a choice to connect a hardware wallet without a secure element that has vulnerabilities, which those with a secure element don't have, or use one with a secure element, which is probably again manufactured in China and closed-source. And no one knows what it does.

As of today, I think the chances of getting a computer virus that infect secure-element-less hardware wallets through USB and then extract your seed, are very slim. The main benefit of such a storage chip is still against physical attacks, since it's obviously trivial to read off of a memory chip on a PCB in- or out-of-circuit.
One pretty big mitigation against this is using an airgapped hardware wallet instead.

Of course, if you input your xpub into a wallet application on a compromised 'China-made blackbox', the xpub could be stolen through some CPU backdoor.

It's not true though that 'no one knows what it [secure element chip] does'. I noticed a few years ago, more sophisticated secure chips were more 'en vogue'; getting not only the task of secure storage but also being used for seed generation and such. These days, e.g. Foundation Passport, uses a more simple chip that just stores data and nothing else. The RNG is completely open-source on the PCB.

Quote from: n0nce on May 08, 2022, 12:14:11 AM

I just checked the Foundation Passport's security model again and it actually doesn't use the (closed source) secure element for randomness!
[...]

But I digress; for life-changing amounts of money, always feel free to go more paranoid (I don't intend to discredit / discourage when using this word), roll dice, use minimal, open-source software that runs on a RISC-V CPU, and store everything on paper!