 Okay party people at the Chaos West stage. Here is the next talk. It's a very nice talk actually performed by this great and beautiful Michael. He will talk about the Manjaro hardware wallet. So we're gonna have actually some very nice pictures, live pictures from a camera taken from this hardware. It's gonna be absolutely amazing. I'm hyped. Please Mike go ahead. Great thank you Nanook. Yeah well let's get started. I'm quite happy to follow the mobile wallet which was given by M29. What's his name again? Anyway we're gonna be talking mostly about hardware wallets and in particular Monero hardware showcasing the wallets that we have produced so far. Prototypes. This is so this is a very the very sparse description that I've put up here just to explain what the project is about to answer the questions that people typically have. So this is what okay got cut off at the bottom. If you don't mind we won't have a slide deck. Okay I'm quite lazy so I don't like making slides and this is online so whoever wants to review it as we're talking can just go to this URL ghostbin.com paste EPM BK. It's a public a public a what is it called a public etherpad or ghost pad or whatever and that's all that we're gonna have. It's gonna be quite fast. This is my name by the way Michael Shlofen Benavitz. You can call me Michael just like it says right there and I go by MSVB usually online when it's IRC or when we're chatting or or something like that. So just like so many other hard other Monero groups like Covree or Monero software we do our communication mostly in IRC channels so you might have Monero dash CCC for the planning for this event you might have Monero dash dev for the development and we also have Monero dash hardware which looks like this dash hardware. So you get the idea that's the IRC channel. Anytime you have a question you want to pop into this channel then you might get an answer depending on which time zone you're living in. Anyway so we can start with a bit of history because the hardware project has not been around too long. Officially it's been around since the first of October. It kind of started at DEF CON last year what last year no 2017 this year's DEF CON in July in Las Vegas that's where there was a Monero party quite nice one high up on a hotel in a hotel room and I was meeting with a few other people we decided to group into a hardware division so to say so to speak and create something a pilot project that would become the Monero hardware wallet. A lot of people believe that Monero is missing their own hardware wallet so that's where it all began and that's kind of the beginning of the project and the history. Now the particular project we're working on the hardware wallet should last six months until we're able to provide a design and what that means is that we're not we're not planning to release a firmware that's full featured and stable we're not planning to release an enclosure or a case if you'd rather you know plastic or aluminum or whatever it is we're not planning to release quite a lot of things we're focusing really right on to the circuits the PCB the printed circuit board and and the hardware design itself so figuring out if we want to put an e-paper inside if we want to have a battery if we want to have a charging circuit if we want to use a particular MCU all of these decisions we'd like to reach consensus on them and produce a design before the six month frist the six month end of the project which should be at the end of March and where does that take us it takes us right to about the first of April but this is not a poissante real this is no joke we probably will finish by then we're on track and and tie on time so far and I believe that there is a CCC event that Easter heck it's about that time I think it's going to be in Wurzburg this year so if you're all there in Wurzburg for Easter heck you may see our release party at least we're planning to do that that means that at the end of March if we're on time we will have a Monero hardware wallet design and I do have some prototypes here to show because as we're creating the design we need to test and so we produce we produce boards but I do need to back up because I did mention that the project started at Defcon in Las Vegas and that we talked a little bit about what other things you could do with hardware and Monero is quite ambitious in a lot of ways so we might be producing for example some years some month whenever ATM machines payment processors specialized cards smart cards that actually operate as wallets or something else or as security devices or as signature verifiers or you can use them to log into what I don't know an SSH server or something a lot of other hardware wallets can already do that but I'm just trying to point out that we may not only be making a wallet so we just took care of that took care of that this is what you have to do when you have no slides right and we took care of that right now I guess we can take a look at what everybody wants to see so my camera is not so good I hope you can see this so this is kind of what we may end up with the form factor and let me see if I can make this better here that's okay I think anyway so this is kind of what we want to end up with this is not a Monero project you probably recognizes some of you folks right this is a node MCU so this is actually very different than anything we're planning to produce this is a general-purpose computer but it's about the same size and format you can make a enclosure for it it has some holes has some connectivity we'll probably only use USB this has a lot of RF you can see the antenna there as well this laser does not do the job anyway and this is kind of an example of what we may end up with so that was so that was the other hardware and there is another yet another example of other hardware here I think I'll this time I will put a white piece of paper underneath so that might be a bit easier to see with a paper I think I don't know anyway so this is another piece of hardware which we created in in the Monero hardware lab but it's not a wallet there we go yeah so so what we have here is a it's basically I call it a crypto shield because all it does is provide crypto features to just about anything that it can connect with this can be connected to an Arduino or Raspberry Pi anything with GPIO with GPIO and I squared C connectors so that's an interface that's used on this I squared C and the laser won't do the job but you can see the you can see the secure elements here in the middle and what a secure element does is it basically offers you a lot of cryptography a lot of crypto acceleration in hardware and some features to basically lock down the the appliance in altogether it avoids the problem of reading secret keys out because you can blow fuses that are internal to the chips and then the secret key can never be read out again these kind of things so this is what we're experimenting with and using these kind of devices this is not a Monero device but it's something similar I'll go right ahead and show the first generation of Monero wallet that we have this was this is a couple months old already like I said the project is is intended to to end after six months so so we're almost halfway through and this one is a couple months old there's a lot of glitter oh if I just if I stand right here then then it looks okay anyway so this is the very bottom this is the bottom of the PCB that's why you don't see very many components you can see some passives these are resistors I believe no these are capacitors and some other things but this is the bottom so let's turn it over and take a look at the parts that are the cool parts are on top and if I do this this is kind of how it will be used all right so this is how we this is how this is one version one variant of how the the hardware wallet will look it has a has a MCU in the middle it has some some input and output some buttons we might add one or not has a LCD or or OLED in this case and of course it has the very important logo there for the Monero hardware wall so if you are looking around for the programming interface this we have JTAG on here and this is a very sleek and and very nice what are they called I forgot the name of it but I'm pretty nice connector here 1.27 millimeter spacing and we've got a micro USB there for power and data like I said we're doing most of the communication through USB as so many other hardware wallets are anyway so this was our first generation the it's quite large if if you want to compare size this is a beagle bone black so that's the size of a beagle bone black which is similar to the size of a what raspberry pi or something do you like beagle bone blacks okay so we have some fans not of the Monero hardware but well okay of other hardware anyway so this is the one okay this is this is this is a size in the form factor that we're kind of looking at for a developer edition so we're already considering having more than one Monero hardware wallet one for the developers which appreciate large connectors and maybe micro USB which is easier to work with and on top of that if you know anything about side channel attacks and analysis glitching and clock based attacks CPA correlation power analysis all these kind of things there's really cheap device that helps you do this analysis called the chip whisper and the chip whisper has a what a accessory board that accepts a UFO format PCB and that's exactly the format that we chose to use here so we can just drop this into a chip whisper and do analysis directly without doing any wiring at all and that's why we're going to keep this form factor the way it is this is going to be locked down in code and and this is our developer edition so we'll get wild and crazy on the developer edition we probably won't consider a lot of use cases that for example border agent border crossings and so on okay we'll do that in firmware and but this is more of a consumer feature for us so moving on to where are we anyway okay we're on we're on Monero hardware we can X this one out now we're on Monero hardware and right so what is the current state of Monero hardware here is our panelization of the consumer edition I can't even fit it in there I mean can you kind of see that maybe I should just do this so this is a panel of hardware wallets there's 10 hardware wallets on there and this is what we get back from the printer and then once we receive this we either hand solder it one by one or we slip it into a pick-and-place machine after stenciling a solder on there I apologize that I can't show all of the steps I didn't bring my pick-and-place machine with me in this suitcase they're rather large anyway but this is kind of what it looks like close up let's see if I can let's see if I can block off the glare stand just right you see that cool gold I just think that's excellent anyway the things look kind of okay and this is the consumer edition it's a lot smaller as you can tell there's still J tag on there even though it's a consumer edition that slanted row and you can see where the buttons are going to come on there those those are those two blocks there and then at the top that's where we solder on a plastic header for the screen and in the middle you can't see the laser can you but anyway in the middle is the the part that's the most important part it says MCU the microcontroller unit and after we solder everything on there it looks like this so right I can even put two of them on there actually I can't do that well you get the idea and yeah that's another thing that we sometimes have to do we had sometimes have to create our own test harness and debug cables so I made this special electro wonk about four days ago because I had some problems with the USB-C connector USB-C connectors are real pain if you're if you're developing hardware and you're considering going to USB-C yes do it but plan on spending a lot of time getting that right USB a micro USB or mini USB all these old standards that are about a year old you just need to get four contacts right you need the two data and then the power in the ground I mean there's five contacts I think but you only need to get four of them right with the USB-C connectors you need 24 contacts and they're smaller so it's just ridiculously difficult to get that perfect when you're soldering underneath the chip and anyway that's why I made this electro wonk that you see there and on the end of the electro wonk if you're curious that's how it looks I just kind of stripped the wires in order to test so that's a little anecdote but here you can kind of see the difference the bottom row that's before they're populated the wallets are populated with the ICs with chips and components and the top is where it's populated you can even see the plastic headers where the screens pop in maybe I should kind of slant that hey that's pretty cool I like the slanting action there and so what does a screen look like when you that's I mean I'm not going to plug it in but that's kind of how they look the whole idea with these plastic headers are not elegant like this one this one has a soldered on a soldered on screen you can tell from the you can tell from the the FPC that the fine pitch connector here that's soldered on it's much more elegant and it's flat it lays flat and it's nice but we can't use those when we're doing testing we're trying to send devices out so people can produce firmware for them or test or give opinions feedback and so on and if we just keep sending devices out with the screen soldered on first of all that means a lot more hand soldering for us real pain and second of all we're spending on extra screens that people already have so the answer to that we think is to just purchase these purchase these screens that are mounted onto a PCB and they have pins and then we just pop those on the the wallet and the next one that we send out to that same tester we don't send a new screen out they just use their old one so that's kind of the idea alright and so that's kind of how it looks you can probably tell the one in the middle there I started desoldering parts from it because there was a loop of some kind somewhere it was I could tell that ground was connected to power over the USB circuit so I just started debugging and that's kind of how it looks when you get things wrong and then I guess I could show these two which are actually working and that's kind of how finished prototypes look I mean sometimes we we decide to slant the screen you know for like a Ferrari red slanted you know spoiler look that's really really cool or sometimes we just do it like that that's a little easier you can get underneath the screen and push you know push things around and connect leads so this USB-C connectors not everybody has a USB-C cable and that's why that's why there's these adapters if you look carefully well it's not going to work but it's actually a USB-C to to USB what the micro so that's what we're sending out now to Monero community in order to test and get feedback I guess I can probably do a demo before we get into questions right and so I'm not sure which one I'll demo I guess I'll do this one and what do I need need some power there we go I've got to stand in the right place so yeah the problem with OLED screens and focusing on cameras you can tell what the problem is right there's no focus problem because you can see the text on the PCB it's just impossible to read what it says I can read it myself it says Mono Zor Mono Zor HW hardware wallet by DFU so this is the first firmware that we produced ourselves and we're able to program the board over DFU or device firmware update which is not sure if it's a standard but it's a typical procedure that that you use if you want to avoid JTAG programming and kind of more esoteric SWD or things like that so it's much easier you can do everything with a USB cable and that's why we kind of celebrated by yeah by printing that onto the screen and that's almost the only thing it does I mean it doesn't seem like a lot but just getting the tool chain right and the programming and the DFU and so on believe me that that's quite a task to celebrate we did that and then we do have two buttons so let's see if you can see that when that when I push the one button let me see work can't see where I'm pushing there it is so if I pushed there so now when I push the button gonna read it again it says left button and if I push the other button says guess what right button left button right button left button right button if I push them both yeah yeah I don't know if the I don't know if the Beagle bone black can do that by the way it's really so let's see what happens if I push them both what do you think will happen you think it'll crash the board okay let's see I'm gonna push them both oh okay the last one that went down is the one that gets this but no it's the it's a left one well it didn't start a fire so I'm happy about that anyway so that's kind of as far as we've gotten with the firmware oh yeah and we're gonna keep working on the firmware but like I said before a priority is on the hardware design right so right I can just keep yeah I can I can do the same thing with these smaller Ferrari style I made them red because it's kind of the holiday season you know red I don't know does that make sense but yeah there's plenty of styles and colors we can choose I'm the if I just I can show all of them you know if you want to see any of these others working you just need to come back to the Monero stand because it's kind of repetitive so we'll get back to here and we finished that so what most people ask when we're talking about this winter online or or I don't know just in general kind of the five top questions are why should there be another hardware wallet because there are others there's like keep key okay so I'm not sure if keep key will be with us in another year it looks maybe I don't want to say anything bad but I haven't seen too much development there there are some answers to the question why another wallet the trouble with that is you need to line up a group of 20 individuals and ask them that same question you will get about 15 different answers or groups of answers and after you do that you will finally have a good overview of why the world doesn't need another wallet and why the world does need another wallet so it's really I'm gonna avoid the question from net for now there's I assume that the same answers that applied as the second hardware wallet came in existence apply for this situation just as well there are many more than two hardware wallets at this time and as long as they all diverge from features and I don't know operational models price freedom open source or not these kind of things I think it's just fine that there are differences and that we have a flourishing ecosystem of hardware as well as software I can't imagine anybody saying we should have only one or two cryptocurrencies right this is bad that we have a flourishing ecosystem of cryptocurrency technology based on blockchain and with various types of software and that's kind of the same answer that I would provide but that's just me I'm just one person don't trust me but that's my answer to why another wallet and speaking of differences and diverging features so we will have some things before we integrated usb-c before there was any other hardware wallet design that incorporated usb-c for example that's just one example if we put a e-paper display in which means that you can still read the public address or the public you know the public information of a person of an individual's wallet even when it's disconnected from usb even when the battery is dead so that would be a feature we're kind of fighting with features like that because sometimes somebody wants to turn off all information and how would they do that if the battery is dead and the e-paper is continuing to display it but you get the idea there's quite a lot of features that are yet to be integrated into other hardware wallets on the market and so that's kind of what differentiates the Monero hardware wallet from other contenders lots of people want to buy one or they want to get in line to buy one or these kind of questions no sorry there's no way to buy one but maybe after we have a design after Easter egg and if you pay attention maybe talk to Monero folks they can point you in the right direction even before then if you want to test or help out or contribute in any way looking at documentation making photos and uploading to a blog or plugging in your JTAG programmer to see if it works etc you're probably way up on the list to receive a prototype device in the mail if you provide your mail address which is a big problem we have in Monero nobody wants to do that so anyway so that's about the trouble with purchasing and what if I lose it so these are the kind of questions we get sometimes which are based on firmware and features that are in the software or the host software running on a computer or the type of USB cable or these kind of things that don't apply too much to the hardware design so obviously if you lose your hardware wallet then you will have the same ease of recovery or problems of loss as any other hardware wallet they basically all offer some kind of backup feature and security system where you're in control of your data even if you lose a hardware wallet but this and many other similar questions depend on a firmware being established and and test well tested and available we don't have that so it's hard or almost impossible to answer these type of questions you can still ask them I don't mind we can you know we can we can find the answers together right and then how do I participate if I really like this idea we're very open group everything is open source even the process so the project plan the the disclaimer which is a legal document which basically says yes I want to receive a wallet in the post or something all of that stuff the members list we have about 30 members in our group everything is is out in the open and we have never signed an D.A. and don't plan to in fact it's a requirement not to do so NDA is a non non disclosure agreement we have no secret processes or secret decisions or secret meetings anything like that no secret contracts so if you like that idea I mean that's kind of a unique thing in the hardware market in general and and wallets as well then the question becomes how do I participate and I can answer that pretty easily because if you well let's get rid of this discover here so this is going to be hard to read I think it's kind of small right but I'll read it to you in fact I'll put this in fact you don't you don't have to write that down because it's in the etherpad if you just got this URL right at the very top the second one down that's where that's where we have our TAIGA system which is a project management system it's not only open source but you can actually own the data and have it in your internal infrastructure that's what Monero kind of likes Monero doesn't like when there's a slack types of system where maybe or maybe you do own the data or maybe you don't but it's not inside your control right so this is in in the control of a corporate group somewhere in the world with a group of servers that follow a type of policy anyway so TAIGA is better in that sense if you like self-control over your project then that's what you do and that's what we've got here here's some projects for example M204950 I think is his name and the nice fellow the very bright fellow that showed off the the mobile wallet he has a project here as well I think it's probably where is it must be here okay well I don't see it but it's here as well and like here's the project that we have for planning this event and our table back over there the 34c3 and this is the project that I'm talking about now the RFC hardware wallet one design so I'm just gonna click on that and that brings me to well you get the idea this is how it looks and then this is the timeline this is kind of what a chronological order of what's been happening this is a great way to to get familiar with the with the development side of things so here's a person who just signed on he's a he's gonna do mechanical engineering wants to at least mechanical engineers they're kind of responsible for for enclosures so they'll probably be making designs oh you know I forgot to show that we do have a half design of a mechanical enclosure see that nice acrylic there if I just block the light off you can see that so that's kind of half of an enclosure that's a very start of an enclosure anyway so we're getting started on that too just because it's not a requirement doesn't mean we're not interested so this is another thing that's not a requirement is RF or radio frequency interfaces none of I won't say none I think most or maybe none of us like the idea of having radio frequency involved in hardware wallets is it's just too yucky I mean okay theoretically you can lock it down is be secure I know so but we're still experimenting with that for a number of reasons we might be forced into using a chip that has an RF interface Bluetooth and NFC and if we do that then we'll probably make use of the NFC mostly so that you can have a wallet to wallet protocol where you know you're tapping another device and receiving an address a public address or you want to pay your friend so you tap your two devices together and that's how each device knows you know what to send and what to receive when would you want that if you want to avoid optical character recognition in QR codes if you realize that there's cameras all over the room then you don't really want to hold your phone out or something with a QR code piece of paper or something you might be able to use an NFC circuit in that case to avoid detection if that's what you if you'd like to remain anonymous I mean it's not the perfect method because there's there's there's plenty of ways to defeat that as well but it's just another another option those are features that we're looking at another thing we're looking at if you take a look at the left-hand corner it says ledger blue port so we're always interested in porting designs from other contenders and then mixing it up and then taking some portions of their design putting 10% of the treasure inputting 10% of the ledger in maybe putting 50 or 60% of our own ideas in and then we're moving 20% of those mixing it up like that or shift devices has an excellent wallet called the what is it called the bitbox right that's kind of cool it has very unique stuff on there like a capacitive touch element and a cut through board LED that's very bright I like it a lot it has a SDHC card so everyone is a bit different and we're thinking about borrowing or contributing you know this inner this very interactive method of working with these groups and yeah sharing features so that's what we're doing here with the ledger for example then we've got a person came on as a tester another revision of the of that port here's a person who was working on logos more boring stuff probably project planning for me so this is what we saw before I mentioned how cool that gold looks it costs a bit more to put gold on there that's real gold by the way it's a real gold but you know I mean we're Monero right it's worth it isn't it you have to do it if you're Monero yeah the next board it'll be a different color I don't know what do you think this is what I need and we need to figure out the color of the next prototype board I mean it can be green it can't be red because it's not Christmas anymore but it could be like black it could be green blue yeah orange is not available yellow you like yellow yellow is available oh yellow for Easter like eggs oh by the way the guy that likes black beagle bone blacks he's not here anymore he got really bored I think and so yeah this is what the panels look like when we get them from the printer we put some other freebies in the in the holiday packages those are signets which are made by another excellent hardware group they basically just sign what does the signal do I've actually forgotten I haven't put one together yet does it has anybody bought or assembled a signal I believe yeah they sign things so they do some cryptography so this is the programming portion we're doing this with a flyswatter too which is also open not sure if it's open source hardware but they're very open open people they they make their own stuff and it's rather rather good you can see it says JTAG debugger there then we have a logo there and more board examples and this is kind of what we thought it might look like for the holiday send off of prototypes blah blah blah so that's kind of answering the question how do I get started whoops which is here how do I participate now to make it even easier I mean there's all kinds of stuff there's a wiki here you can kind of take a look at the documentation the requirements are here we have a set of requirements if you want to get familiar with the project more we've been interviewed by journalists on a number of occasions really cool designs there I love this picture with a blueprint in the background and a microscope I just love that yeah and and our good friend Anonimo who is the the chief Covery developer he kind of got us started in this and made all of the personal connections in in DEF CON in Las Vegas last year this year so that's kind of the first interview that we had with the journalist he was on board and kind of hanging out that's why he's part of the picture there yeah these are the requirements I mean it's kind of a long document some of these things might be a bit boring but functional requirements like obviously we're going to take five volt power from USB we're gonna have a three volt battery housing this is this could be come in handy if we if we use a very low-powered MCU for a detethered operation of some sort with a reduced functional yeah reduced features but we can detether we can no longer have USB and the thing is still working so there's some I'm not going to go through this but you know you can get you get the idea that there are some well-documented requirements there so and here's the program I was talking about where you can receive a device and test it and give your opinion you can say this is really not as good as a blackberry beagle bone black I'd rather have a raspberry pie anyway and yeah if you do decide that this is for you you just need to read this part right and it basically involves saying yes I want I've read the disclaimer and I and I live here and you should send me a board and then you sign it in any way you want in fact it tells you how to sign it using the Monero software here somewhere I find that really really cool wait a minute how does I how do I sign it somewhere it shows you I can't find it now yeah but the Monero software can be used to sign generic text I mean we all know that this is possible from the Bitcoin client as well it's it's no it's not yeah it's easy to do but I just find that a very elegant method all right so say that you want to get in touch with us you don't know how or you don't so there's a button here at the very bottom that says meet up I don't know why it says meet up but if you click on that then another window opens and you're sent to the matter most channel this is actually bridge to IRC so if you don't have an IRC client if you don't know what IRC is you don't like it or whatever then you can use this and this is similar to Slack but it is it's an in-house type of thing where you don't lose control over your data right so we prefer that I think and yeah you have to be signed in to get this screen you need an account but it's quite easy to set up the account it's about one minute procedure and the way I saw that is by going here and clicking on meet up right and there's all these other things you can see who's on the team for example blah blah blah there I am I'm Michael and online I'm MSVB there's there's the issues bug reporting the wiki there's a kind of a sprint type of our I'm sorry a agile methodology type of project planning here so well for example there's a technical familiarization sprint and then it loads that and you just kind of check out the tasks that are involved some of these are finished some are still in progress so here I had to order trial components for example blah blah you get the idea there's epics I don't even know what an epic is and then back to the timeline so that's some how you get involved in the project or how you learn more about it regardless of if you want to get involved or not and I think we're done whoops stay stay stay stay yeah so that was how do I participate and if anybody has new questions or if you have a request if you want to see a another device start working or something else then off to you there's a question there thank you hey Michael that was a nice talk I love the the close-on pictures of the of your hardware is it okay if I as usual ask three questions first or do you want to really want to go ahead no let's go with your guys questions first meet me right there if you want to ask a question on stage you can but you will be on screen and on the internet just wait a second we do have time there's no rush here I'll pass this you can pass this around take a look I can't get past the speakers but if someone comes up I just have actually I have more than two I think I have three hey thanks Michael for the talk just want to know from like the chip design if this is like Monero only or if this supports all crypto notes coins yeah that's a good question so that the optimist the optimistic perspective that I would like to offer is that anybody can code to support more than just Monero yeah there's another one that's a first-generation the green one is the first-generation so I would hope that whoever had an interest in Zcash would try to find a way to pack that into the program storage and then run it from the bootloader and see what happens in so many cases you can just basically take code from a jithub repository and that's three quarters of everything you need to do to port a competing cryptocurrency onto for example a mining rig or a hardware wallet I mean there are some problems that that do impede from me making this crossover Monero has some very unique crypto algorithms like for example we don't use the sek p256 k1 curve which is what's used in elliptic curve digital signature algorithm or ecdsa we use a different one so that one that I just mentioned the sek p the sek 256 p1 that's what's used by ethereum by litecoin by bitcoin by I think almost everything I mean you guys are pros so you can correct me if I'm wrong but if there's maybe a hundred different cryptocurrencies then maybe 90 or 95 of them use exactly that curve that elliptic curve now Monero uses a different one which is called ed 25519 as well as curve 25519 so the one is a Montgomery curve and the other is a Edwards curve they're basically very very different than the Bitcoin and the others so you're kind of stuck with that if we choose for example a secure element that can only support that or that's gonna that's gonna be one thing that's difficult to to people porting other cryptocurrencies on the other hand it it's probably not the case that we restrict our secure element to just that one curve so who knows another thing that I'd like to mention a lot of hardware wallets are trying to do everything at once and they're packing in all kinds of cryptocurrencies into a single into signal application I think that's fine but it kind of gets wild and crazy and especially if you have limited yeah thank you yes let's get excited so especially if you have limited program storage which is 512 k bytes on these mcu's you can't do very much with that so if you have ring signatures and confidential transactions and stuff like that happening inside and programmed onto on that MCU it might be pretty challenging to to implement other types of cryptocurrency models based on other elliptic curves on top of that I would say go for it and I hope you do it we'll be very supportive in in that we will try to over estimate I'm sorry should I should I say underestimate I yeah I should we'll we're gonna underestimate the resources required for implementing a hardware wallet so hopefully you all and me and everybody will have more than we need in order to put another cryptocurrency inside thank you so is the hardware full free lossless a lossless open source is it floss yes it is it follows the CERN license which is very common for hardware projects and I've actually forgotten if well because we don't have an official firmware and host software portion in this project we have not defined software licenses we've only defined hardware licenses and they're fully open source if you read the CERN license it has a it has a poison pill it has all the stuff that you really like to see in an open source license thanks for the talk I have a question more about software you haven't spoken a lot about it but who's writing the firmware for for this hardware and how is that project can you repeat that who is writing the firmware for this hardware so there are a few people doing that at least I think the best answer to that is is that there is no firmware component to the project so if we have firmware in this case it's a it's it's to allow us to test you know just that left button right button so we don't have an official firmware group there is a set of people three or four I believe in that list of team members and they have a role set to them that's not mechanical engineering it's not design it's firmware it's coding I think that's what we call it I think you're asking a different question though you don't want to know if there's team members that have a role set to coding you'd like to know where maybe the the jithub repository is and how that's proceeding right no I was thinking what's the status of the software side I mean you have to have the hardware first but then to have something working you need the software side as well so I was that that was my question what's the status of that yeah the status is that it's on our minds that we know we agree with you that we need software and firmware after the hardware is done and we also know that there's there's some disagreement as well how much firmware and software we need upfront in order to produce a valid and good hardware design do we need to have these efforts going in parallel for example and we really haven't reached a decision on that but first of all in our jithub repository which is under the Monero dash project I won't mention it okay I'll mention it's called Secura but this name is gonna change anyway so under that sub directory there is a a sub sub directory that's firmware and so it will go in there and if you're wondering well why don't we start with a firmware why haven't we finished enough firmware consider that most contending groups that are producing hardware wallets they're doing this with five or ten team members they're well-financed they have a list of customers and they still cannot produce and begin taking orders for a new generation of hardware without working for two years so most group need two years between the time that they start conceiving a new design and they're actually ready to send that order off to Shenzhen or whoever whoever's doing the assembly and printing we're trying to do this in a very kind of ccc chaotic manner very loosely coupled loosely structured in six months so there's no room in there to actually do the firmware and the enclosure and the modding and a lot of other things so that's kind of a sloppy answer but and there's another abstract answer as well that whoever gets on IRC and says I know exactly how to code firmware and I can I can provide what 10 files that you know we can do a nice hello world type of flappy birds thing on there just to show that everything's working right and we can integrate portions of the open source code from other projects and I can help with that that's kind of what we need and that would accelerate development of firmware as well but we're focusing on hardware and that's why we don't have features that are typical of a hardware wallet at this time we've only been working at it for about two months two and a half months it's over there thanks Michael for the talk I'm curious about the history of the project from a social community perspective can you tell a little bit how the project went from an initial ID to a current group of a large group fairly large group of contributors and testers yeah yeah it's I kind of intentionally shortcut the history portion because it's it doesn't interest that many people so one thing that's worth mentioning them is that before I came on at DEF CON in July there were other people working on firmware adaptations of Monero source code for existing hardware wallets and these came kind of pretty close to to producing something usable for Monero and they died off in the end or something happened where it just didn't work out so that's kind of the prehistoric existence of a Monero hardware wallet for us the community and so so I guess I was the first team member to come on and the few people that I had met in DEF CON yeah you can read the article it's actually inside there's endogenic and animal fluffy pony they kind of they know the other way around the project very well and they were very encouraging about my idea to do something with hardware and that a wallet would be the perfect place to start and I just came from the black hat a black hat workshop where I produced my own hardware I showed it actually the the board the one with the secure elements so I was really enthusiastic that's kind of the start for me of the project and once it got traction in the community a lot of people there was incredible there was a lot of hate talk on reddit we got past that we got we got past a lot of a lot of I don't know boundaries and things in order to kind of get the idea that the community agreed that we should have a hardware wallet that the Monero community controlled and owned because there's a copyright on all documents it says the copyright the Monero project year so that's kind of the history and the and the cultural development if you'd like of the project is that does that answer your question yeah thank you in what sense in what regard in what regard do hardware wallets add value to Monero to the use case how how would it benefit the value of Monero yeah so how will a hardware wallet add value to the Monero community ecosystem technology in general right so some people don't know this but Monero is more a project than anything else it's not only a cryptocurrency it's not just something on a ticker that you'll see that that's you know a value that you can exchange it's actually a collection of projects so what we have which I'm quite excited about it's called Covery which is a generic anonymization layer similar to Tor we've got things like open alias which is also under the umbrella of Monero which allows you to exchange addresses without those crazy long numbers or optical recognized QR codes which are captured by cameras or anything else you just know the email address of your friend and that's their addresses there their XMR Monero address as well and there's all these different projects there's a number of them and they all add of just a bit of value it this is kind of this is the way I see things that a lot of these people they have different reasons for starting and and maintaining their projects but each of these projects strengthens the ecosystem as a whole right so what you end up with is a higher-valued technology in general so you have these developers they're very well known they're writing the the demon the servers and the clients and they deserve a lot of praise but what we also have around the people writing books e-books you know what hardware wallets and I think that they intrinsically add value to the whole technology I see that point but I would like to question you though to like give us a concrete example where you could imagine a hardware wallet being of value right on the market on the street here at our club what could it be where would your project your hardware-based project add value okay I'm not sure if I understand the question it's not about the price no no it's only about use case how would I imagine it being used out there right well this could be that I could possibly rephrase a question how do hardware wallets of any kind protect the value of a person's virtual wallet of this virtual currency right because you can have brain wallets you can have all kinds of different wallets why does there have to be something with silicon parts or two-factor authentication like Google Authenticator does right it's quite secure already so why would I want to add to that well I mean two-factor authentication without a token that you actually own that's physical is kind of hard to imagine right so you have to have some hardware to make two-factor work and this is the same type of model that makes a hardware wallet of any kind protect and secure a wallet in general so without that hardware you still have a wallet it can be a paper wallet that gets burned if your house burns down you can get a bank a bank vault and then they have control over your hardware you see the point but a hardware wallet kind of adds value in the sense that it's another it's another type of protection that you can choose to use in securing your hardware wallet I think that it's if you're a superperson a superwoman or a superman then you have a mobile wallet and you have a hardware wallet and you have a brain wallet and you have a paper wallet and you have a crypto steal and you have all of these different things okay that's actually the best situation because if anything fails I mean you can argue about it because it actually increases the attack vector as well but so this is the arrangement that you can choose from if hardware wallets don't exist then we do lose value in general not just in Monero but everywhere because you have less choice and they do play an important role in securing hardware just as two-factor authentication tokens whatever they are play a role in securing you know your access control to whatever server software and you didn't ask the question but I'll answer it anyway so some people like to know this kind of goes along the lines of the can I buy one one of the requirements is to make this technology real cheap real nice on the pocketbook so you can you can you can take you can order one or assemble one yourself you can pay for one just to experiment and you can pay for six you can buy six of them I mean if some of the hardware wallets on the market they cost about 300 euros and they kind of they do one thing well they protect your wallet they do the same thing as the cheaper ones so we're considering figuring out a way to have hardware wallets be produced and go on to the market so that you can pay 10 or 20 euros for one maybe less if we get a sponsor on board you know and you can you can buy five or ten of them yeah for me that's the essential point of your pitch there that the current devices cost about 300 euros and you're about to lower the costs 100 fold 10 fold I don't know somewhere between that right that's nice that's nice that adds value of course yeah it's nice for some people most of the people in the hardware wallet market they're making a lot of money right now because their technologies are so expensive you know we're actually very good friends with with the competition we travel out to Prague we travel to Sweden I'm sorry to Switzerland to Zurich we'll probably make a trip to Paris all these places producing wallets and I've talked to people on the phone and even other non-wallet technology like OpenDime it's it's just very nice to interact with them because they're very friendly people and most are pretty supportive I mean they lock their technology down there is no hardware wallet available for purchase or anything that has a pure open-source model where they open source and everything's free all the documentation the procedures the the project plan the roadmap and so on there is no other so but so we all we respect that as well we don't we don't go out to Zurich and say hey you know you're schematic I mean it's it's probably defective because why other why would you otherwise lock it down and close it yeah we don't do that we were friends and yeah anyway so I can't remember what question answering probably blabbing is probably time to close this off isn't it any other questions okay give it up for Michael one more time thank you very much thank you from the depth of my heart because you grilled him very very good better than I could ever do in the hot chair and if you want to know more about Monero there are 10 about 10 or 12 features that are very easy to learn about you just have to walk back to the table there you get this poster we have enough for you you can take one home and it's really very well made don't you think say yes yes I absolutely love it Michael 10 10 reasons okay so people were wondering sometimes we pass around chocolate just pass it on people bring food here I don't know them sometimes sometimes they are my friends that's how we do it here in the CCC also thank you for bringing back all the hardware is this all the hardware this is very friendly I love this friendly community this is a last reminder we have one more talk later on what does it say something about networking scalability and privacy it's gonna be right here we still have some free slots if you have a presentation a topic or something that's your just your personal kink contact me or the team we are more than thankful to give you a stage we have cameras and audio and you get all the files to take home and to show your friends everybody wants to hold a talk on the Congress right so you can do this here thank you and see you later