The team behind the creation of Trezor One, the world’s first-ever hardware wallet, has maintained that the wallet is still thriving on its privacy and security obligations eight years now since its debut in 2014.
The idea of a hardware wallet started in 2011 after a Bitcoin (BTC) conference in Prague, Czech Republic. The meeting joined two crypto enthusiasts, Pavol “Stick” Rusnák and Marek “Slush” Palatinus, who envisioned a small, single-purpose computer that would securely store users’ Bitcoin private keys.
Interestingly, the joint team co-founded SatoshiLabs in 2013, launching the first-ever Trezor wallet the following year. A few years later, SatoshiLabs unleashed its beta version Trezor Model T, which added a touchscreen to the device. The two hardware wallets are currently available for sale across various market platforms worldwide.
In an exclusive interview on February 09, Kristýna Mazánková, the head of PR at SatoshiLabs, and Josef Tětek, Trezor’s brand ambassador, discussed how Trezor remains efficient on both privacy and security after all these years. While commenting about its vulnerability concerns, they said:
“We don’t have any data on our customers [in our servers] because every 90 days, we wipe whatever is stored. So that’s something that is super important to us because we understand that everything is theoretically hackable.”
The team further noted that “when it comes to security, the key feature is it’s a standalone physical device. It’s not possible to hack it remotely,” adding:
“If somebody were to get your hardware wallet, there is an additional layer of protection, such as the PIN code, which locks the device. Even if they were to get around that, there’s always the recovery seed.”
Tětek delved further into the security vulnerability of the Trezor wallet, explaining that the wallet is still secure even in the event of a hack. He asserts that if a hacker may successfully find one’s recovery seed, the inclusion of a passphrase makes the recovery seed useless by itself:
“If you have your Trezor setup, with a recovery seed written down and protected with both PIN and passcode, there’s no way to hack the device at all.”
“Without the passphrase production, there is the possibility to read the seed from the device if you have very specialized equipment.”
While responding to a question on how a contracted hacker successfully managed to breach security codes on Trezor wallet and recovered more than $2 million in January, Mazánková and Tětek said:
“It was like a double coincidence that the owner didn’t update their firmware for five years and didn’t have a password set up. So I think the engineer conducted about 1,000 tries to make sure he didn’t fry the chip before extracting it because if he had one mistake on the chip, he would fry the chip, and the wallet would become non-recoverable.”
Apart from enhanced security and privacy, Trezor Model One and Model T features additional options such as visualizing everything on display, desktop, and other web applications when connected. Moreover, one can buy, sell or trade other digital assets directly via Trezor Suite.
Trezor now focuses on integrating CoinJoin, a trustless method for combining multiple Bitcoin payments from multiple spenders into a single transaction, into its hardware wallets this year. The move is now possible after the Bitcoin Taproot upgrade in November 2021. The hardware wallet also eyes to run one’s node directly from Trezor Suite.
