In January 2018, the world of cryptocurrency saw a theft worth $0.5. How did this happen? Hackers attacked the Coincheck crypto exchange. They first sent out malicious code to employees by e-mail. Then, the hackers accessed private keys to the exchange servers. The latter contained the entire traded volume of one of the cryptocurrencies. They were withdrawing funds through several transactions. This hack affected hundreds of thousands of users.
Another example was the hack of the Parity company. It has been storing private keys from users ‘wallets on servers, encrypted with a set of owners’ keys. However, the algorithm was decrypting them in a vulnerable environment during each transaction. This single defect ultimately led to the theft of cryptocurrency.
Thus, the cryptocurrency market needs an enterprise-grade solution. It needs a single approach to increase the security of storing customers’ keys to the banking level. Do you feel anxious about your asset safety and want to protect it? If you want to know more about it, you can visit https://alligat0r.com/custom/exchange-pairs/0.085/eth/usd/info.
Hardware Protection of Blockchain Systems
Using general-purpose hardware security modules (HSMs) is one of the best practices for protecting sensitive user data. Their physical and logical architecture protects the keys throughout their life cycle.
User data stays protected from both external and insider threats. Even owners and administrators of such services cannot access it. HSMs also allow cryptographic operations within the HSM security boundaries, which brings the reliability of such systems closer to absolute.
Protecting Digital Assets with General Purpose HSMs
There are many examples of the integration of hardware security modules. The cryptocurrency environment needs them especially. The HSM Wallet project is one of them. It has emerged as part of a comprehensive banking and cryptocurrency integration project in 2014. Since then, it has been offering clients a flexible security solution.
HSM Wallet provides a secure runtime environment with Shield Connect hardware security modules. These modules are certified to:
- industry banking FIPS 140-2 Level 3;
- USGv6 accreditation;
- eIDAS;
- Common Criteria EAL4, and more.
This ensures that only authenticated users can access secure cryptocurrency wallets.
HSM Wallet was designed to allow you to perform all actions inside a secure and trusted device — HSM. The client’s private keys cannot be exported outside the keystore in an open format under any circumstances. This provides maximum protection, including from employees and company administrators. If hardware failures, HSM connects a backup module that operates in the cluster.
If you use Alligat0r exchange aggregator, we recommend introducing HSMs for more effectivity. These modules will back you up in terms of any possible troubles. At the moment, such an approach is the only reliable one for securing any blockchain system. Moreover, it is an order of magnitude cheaper in implementation and operation.
