According to Samsung, smartphones are the safest way to store cryptocurrencies.
Samsung Electronics, the smartphone manufacturing industry behemoth, recently commented through an official blog that cryptocurrency wallets based on mobile phones are the safest option for the short and medium term storage of cryptocurrencies. The post explains that smartphones are a very safe place to store digital money in cryptocurrency wallets, up to the equivalent amount that we migh usually keep in our physical wallet. To save long-term cryptocurrencies, Samsung recommends creating multiple backups of the private key associated with the wallets.
The smartphone producer stated that private keys should be stored offline to maximize their security, which means that they should not reside on a mobile phone or any device that connects to the internet regularly. The blog post comments that mobile phone cryptocurrency wallets are the best place to store “spendable” money due to a feature called Trusted Execution Environment (TEE). The TEE runs its own execution independently, which means that the RAM and storage of the phone are separated from the main operating system of smartphones. Because of this, the Android operating system cannot directly access the TEE, even if the operating system is hacked. In this sense, you can only access the TEE through an application programming interface (API). According to the blog post,
“This is why smartphones have an edge over laptops and desktops for cryptocurrency wallets: without the benefits of the hardware-based TEE, the keys are more vulnerable. There is a significant caveat: a naïve wallet developer might choose to simply store the keys on the normal internal storage of the phone, in which case there’s little additional protection from using the smartphone platform.”
However, Samsung says that some novice developer could make the mistake of designing a cryptocurrency wallet that keeps private keys on the smartphone’s hard drive, which would make it vulnerable to hacking, and there is always the risk that a wallet be infected with a malware.
by Samuel Larreal
