Bitcoin was seemingly dragged into the very public debate on privacy and encryption recently. Specifically, President Barack Obama warned that if the government can’t access phones, “…everybody is walking around with a Swiss bank account in their pocket,” which appeared to refer to cryptocurrency.
Last week, Bitcoin Magazine reported on Bitcoin’s industry representatives and their positions on encryption, privacy, Bitcoin’s role in tax evasion and money laundering and more. In part two of our coverage: What do the actual builders of these pocket-sized “Swiss bank accounts” think?
Bitcoin Magazine reached out to Electrum developer Thomas Voegtlin, Breadwallet CEO Aaron Voisine, Mycelium developer Leo Wandersleb and Ledger CTO Nicolas Bacca to see where they stand.
Broken
The debate on encryption and privacy caused by the ongoing dispute between Apple and the FBI took a sharp turn this week. The United States Department of Justice had long claimed it was unable to access encrypted iPhones without help from Apple, but this turned out not to be true.
Although the Department of Justice did not explain how they got access to the phone, the Bitcoin wallet developers Bitcoin Magazine spoke to were not surprised that they could.
Ledger CTO Nicolas Bacca speculated:
“To get access to the data, the FBI probably relied on some kind of physical attack involving the flash memory. Swapping the flash memory or disabling writes could get you infinite retries, so you can brute force the access code. The operating system doesn’t handle that securely.”Bacca also pointed out that Bitcoin itself is much more secure than a typical iPhone.“I believe Bitcoin is less at risk against physical attacks compared to other cryptosystems, because you always get a way to invalidate a possibly compromised key – just send the coins to a different address if you notice quickly enough. The issue is properly […]
