Innovative Countermeasures to Defeat Cyber Attacks Against Blockchain Wallets: A Crypto Terminal Use Case

Abstract

Blockchain transactions are signed by private keys. Secure key storage and tamper-proof computers are essential requirements for deploying a trusted infrastructure. In this paper, we identify some threats against blockchain wallets and propose a set of physical and logical countermeasures to thwart them. We present the crypto terminal device, operating with a removable secure element, built on open software and hardware architectures, capable of detecting a cloned device or corrupted software. These technologies are based on tamper-resistant computing (javacard), smart card anti-cloning, smart card content attestation, application firewall, bare-metal architecture, remote attestation, dynamic Physical Unclonable Function (dPUF), and programming tokens as a root of trust.This paper is an extended version of the paper ''Innovative Countermeasures to Defeat Cyber Attacks Against Blockchain Wallets,'' 2021 5th Cyber Security in Networking Conference (CSNet), 2021, pp. 49-54, doi: 10.1109/CSNet52717.2021.9614649