So I have a couple friends that adamantly insist that using a mobile phone with a wallet (even if paired with a cold wallet), is basically suicide because cell phones are super easy to hack and Bluetooth connections easy to intersect. Is it really that unsafe to use my Nano X with Metamask on an iPhone? I can’t find any good information about this on the internet of the cold wallet + smart phone combo and I feel like if it was really unsafe one would find more about this or that Ledger itself would maybe warn people that using their wallets with a phone is unsafe. I find using my iPhone for trades quite important so I just want to know if I’m being stupid or my friends just don’t understand how this works.
Any good sources of information on this or educated responses would be much appreciated.
It should be. You can always check txs. And obviously not connect to dodgy sites as usual. But if you have a lot of funds in crypto; it does not having a crypto only device.
The Ledger is designed to not trust the computer/phone it’s connected to, basically to assume it’s been hacked. That’s the whole point.
So say an attacker connects to it via bluetooth – what can they do? Maybe they can try to trick you into signing a transaction. You should always check the transaction on the Ledger itself anyway, since malware on your computer could ask to sign a different transaction than you expected. So if you follow that practice, they shouldn’t be able to do much.
Now maybe using the cable instead of Bluetooth adds another layer of security if you’re like at a hacker convention and think someone might try out a novel attack on you. Or if you don’t want anyone in bluetooth range to be able to know you have a Ledger. I don’t know – I don’t think it’s something most people need to worry about.
By the way, iPhones are way more secure than the average computer (but that shouldn’t matter anyway).
This isn’t a movie and your friend is an idiot. Don’t take any security advice from him ever again.
Hacking anything, let alone a random Bluetooth broadcast or an iPhone isn’t easy.
Do they also live off the power grid and often talk about their friend, Q?
Man, listen. The coins aren’t actually on or in any wallet of any kind: hot, cold, or leather. It’s just safety theater, to appeal to the ultra paranoid early adopters (tech uber-nerds) or the late adopters (never-nerds). But realistically, it doesn’t matter. At all.
Unless you figure out a way to program your seed into your genome, you’re just worrying about hiding your password from a dude named Yuri living in a shed on a frozen over lake that happens to have a direct neural interface with his ultra high performance hacking rig…. In other words, the only true safety any of us have is the fact that we’re all probably too broke to be targets in the first place.
Shout out to the homeboy, Yuri.