Is your device betraying you? 3 fundamentals to interact with the blockchain safely.
Fail on 1 of these and you're exposed!
In this newsletter issue, you’ll learn how to protect your on-chain assets by securing the 3 fundamental layers of your personal computing.
Pay close attention because only after learning this you’ll be genuinely confident in the devices you use to make transactions and know how to evaluate your choices in the future.
Unfortunately, most people trust what’s popular, what has the best marketing, or what influencers tell them to use.
It’s because people don’t know how to think about their personal security for themselves
They don’t know:
how to choose and protect their hardware
how hardware choices influence their security
what operating system to use and why
how to decide what software to use (e.g. a software wallet)
Worry not, you’ll learn all these things by reading the weekly Unhackable Money newsletter, and I promise to make it as simple as possible.
Why is it important to learn these things? The fact blockchain is trustworthy isn't enough. The way you interact with it has to be secure as well.
The 3 fundamentals
The 3 fundamentals are:
Hardware
Operating system
Software
And you have to ensure they’re trustworthy in that order. That’s because you can use the most trustworthy and secure software, but you're exposed if you can’t trust your operating system. And you can use the most trustworthy and secure operating system, but if you can’t trust your hardware, you can’t trust anything.
Fundamental 1: Hardware
The hardware you use is critical to your security.
Here is a prime example:
These American companies may have done everything right: they used secure operating systems, trustworthy software, had security procedures in place, etc.
But none of that mattered because of one tiny malicious piece of hardware in their computers.
“But Mat” - you might say - “I can’t disassemble my computer right now. And even if I did, how am I supposed to know what should and should not be there”?
That’s a valid point. I’ll share 3 practical ways how you can ensure your hardware trustworthiness next week.
Fundamental 2: Operating system
Assuming your hardware is trustworthy, the operating system you use is the next critical choice.
Here is a list of popular desktop operating systems from the most to the least trustworthy:
PureOS (Linux distribution)
PopOS (Linux distribution)
MacOS
Windows
It’s worth noting that mobile operating systems, like iOS and Android, tend to be more secure than desktop ones because of the sandboxing - separating each running program from each other.
Therefore, even if you have one malicious app on your phone, you might be fine using other trustworthy apps. While on the computer, all it takes is one malicious program for an entire system to become a compromised environment.
This takes us to the last fundamental - software.
Fundamental 3: Software
So, how do you know a particular software is trustworthy?
Generally, FOSS (Free and Open Source) software is more trustworthy than proprietary software. Why?
Proprietary software (closed source) has no source code available. Therefore, we can’t tell what the software is actually doing. We must trust the proprietor that nothing malicious is happening in the background.
This is important even if you can’t understand software source code. Provided an Open Source software is popular enough, dozens or even hundreds of people have looked through the code already.
So, what are the practical implications of that? FOSS (Free and Open Source) software over Open Source software. And choose Open Source software over proprietary software. For example:
Choose Firefox (FOSS) over Chrome (proprietary)
Choose MetaMask (Open Source) over TrustWallet (proprietary)
Choose Trezor (FOSS) over Ledger (proprietary, partially Open Source)
I hope this has given you a simple mental model to think about your personal computing security: hardware, operating system, software - in that order.
Next week, I’ll give you practical tips on taking care of the most tricky one of the three: the hardware.