Beyond Clear Signing: What Else Should Wallets Do?

Transcript

[music] [music] Okay, good morning everyone. Is understanding your transactions enough or should your wallets do more to protect you? I'm Michael from Wallet and today I want to talk about what should wallets do beyond clear signing. Before we go before I dive in, I want to go through some transaction. And as we go through them, I want you guys to ask yourselves, will you sign it? Will you reject it? Or is the transaction really just confusing?

The first one is a plain send eat transaction. Next one. Next one. Will you sign this one? Next and lastly, as we go through the examples, there were probably some transactions that were easily identifiable as safe or unsafe and transactions that were really just confusing. The main question we should be asking is what should wallets do to help us better make decisions when signing transactions? And let's go through the examples again one by one.

First one is scam alerting. This is the ability of wallets to show users if they're if they're signing a possible scam transactions. Scam transactions such as address poisoning. You might be sending tokens to a poison address. Unlimited approvals. You might be allowing malicious contracts or EOAs to spend your tokens. Known scam addresses. You might be sending tokens to a known scam address. Your wallet should flag these types of transactions. Next one, of course, is clear signing. WT of wallets to show human readable transactions.

This is a safe wallet transaction with clear signing. It clearly shows what the human readable equivalent of the transaction is. And instead of seeing hexadesimal data, you can now clearly understand what you're about to do. Do a safe transaction and add a new signer to your safe account. Next one is transaction simulations. the ability of wallets to simulate the result of a transaction. This is a this is a unis swap transaction and it shows that you're about to send 1.107 USDC and an exchange of 0.004979 E and also that you're approving an

unlimited amount of USDC. The thing about transaction simulation is that it simulates what might happen and not what will happen. For example, when doing swaps, you can still get the worst price from a sandwich attack. This is where transaction assertions come in. Transaction assertions let wallets set condition on what a transaction can do. And if those transa conditions are aren't not are not met, the transaction reverts. But do keep in mind that transaction assertions is still in research. And if you're interested in knowing more about knowing more more about it, Alex Forchot, the author of this EIP is doing

a workshop on Friday. So feel free to drop by. And lastly, another thing that wallets can do is make hardware wallet transaction verification easier. What we're used to currently is verifying pages of hexadimal data and hope that we don't make a single mistake. And thanks to ERCA213 call data digest compresses pages of hexodimal data into a single 32 byt digest. The problem is wallets typically don't implement this altogether. They implement one but not the other. Most of these features are readily available but it doesn't matter if they available if they don't land on wallets. These these protections should reach users.

This is where wallet bit comes in. We evaluate and push wallets to uphold Ethereum values such as privacy, security transparency sense sovereignity, and ecosystem alignment. We give wallets actionable feedback and push them to improve. Scam alerting, transaction simulation, assertions, and easier transaction verifications makes that safety real. If you're a wallet developer, implement this. If you're a wallet user, ask for this. Understanding what you sign is only one part of signing safely.

If you liked my presentation, please feel free to follow me on my on my social media accounts. I am Michael again from Wallet Beat. Thank you. >> Thank you very much. Uh I am checking we have no questions from the Yeah, we have here question from the audience. So let's answer that. Uh why can we have open source hardware wallets? think a hardware wallet that can be assembled cheaply, completely modular and so on. So what do you think? >> I agree. Um one note here is that we haven't focused yet on hardware wallets.

Our main focus currently is software wallets and making impact trying to push wallets into Ethereum values. But for this question, I agree and open source hardware wallets is definitely one criteria of how to pass our evaluation framework. We still have time to do the second question. So please uh how do you recall? What do you ask to do for security from what you ask on privacy?

>> Uh what what does that mean? What what you going to So if you're asking about our evaluation framework, we base our evaluation framework based on objective questions. For example, does your wallet allow exportable private keys? Does your wallet allow exportable seed phrases? There sort those those sorts of things. And we also have benchmark transactions for our evaluation framework. For example, do they decode safe transactions easily? Do they decode batch transactions easily?

All right, we are running almost out of time. [music]