One caveat is that laptops are commonly compromised and your security would depend on nobody stealing keys/passwords needed to access your database/password manager/whatever.
Having hardware token with paper backup, makes this harder. Having a lot of tokens creates a huge incentive for getting hacked.
If you have non trivial amounts of tokens under your control, you need to consider all the points of failure. Laptops get compromised in all sorts of ways and can be equipped with key loggers or worse. Unless you are a security expert, defending against a determined & skilled hacker is super hard. Most of us never get our setups audited by an expert and I'm afraid that a bog standard OS X/linux setup is probably only get you so far. Even if you turn on disk encryption and do all the rest of the things you are supposed to do.
So the advantage of a token is that it does not depend on your laptop being uncompromised and that it is a third party solution that can be scrutinized and audited. That being said, I'm not a big fan of having a proprietary software/hardware package and would prefer to trade in my ledger for a properly OSS platform. There are a few of these platforms but it is early days and I'd need it to support Stellar though. As far as I know, ledger is the only thing working with that. I own a few of those for this reason.
IMHO there's a big market opportunity for creating a secure, easy to use hardware token for ubikey/oauthn signins, managing blockchain wallets, and doing 2fa. Not impossible, but making open hardware/software platforms commercially is apparently still a big challenge. I'd buy several if the price and feature set were right . Assuming enough auditing/vetting has happened by people that are smarter than me, of course.
Founder of StellarGuard here, so sort of in the same realm. Just wondering what additional features you'd want out of such a hardware token. Would it need to do the actual signing of transactions on the device for you to feel secure with it, or would generic U2F (Yubikey) + signing on the software be sufficient, assuming we could do it securely?
Yes, that is the point. Basically you have to work under the assumption that your laptop may be compromised. So anything that exposes private keys to it is going to end up leaking those keys. With the ledger you approve transactions on the token. You configure it from a paper backup or by letting it generate a private key for you and you use it to sign transactions.
One caveat is that laptops are commonly compromised and your security would depend on nobody stealing keys/passwords needed to access your database/password manager/whatever.
Having hardware token with paper backup, makes this harder. Having a lot of tokens creates a huge incentive for getting hacked.
If you have non trivial amounts of tokens under your control, you need to consider all the points of failure. Laptops get compromised in all sorts of ways and can be equipped with key loggers or worse. Unless you are a security expert, defending against a determined & skilled hacker is super hard. Most of us never get our setups audited by an expert and I'm afraid that a bog standard OS X/linux setup is probably only get you so far. Even if you turn on disk encryption and do all the rest of the things you are supposed to do.
So the advantage of a token is that it does not depend on your laptop being uncompromised and that it is a third party solution that can be scrutinized and audited. That being said, I'm not a big fan of having a proprietary software/hardware package and would prefer to trade in my ledger for a properly OSS platform. There are a few of these platforms but it is early days and I'd need it to support Stellar though. As far as I know, ledger is the only thing working with that. I own a few of those for this reason.
IMHO there's a big market opportunity for creating a secure, easy to use hardware token for ubikey/oauthn signins, managing blockchain wallets, and doing 2fa. Not impossible, but making open hardware/software platforms commercially is apparently still a big challenge. I'd buy several if the price and feature set were right . Assuming enough auditing/vetting has happened by people that are smarter than me, of course.