Trezor Hackathon: Putting Steem on the Trezor

Together with @xeroc I recently attended the Trezor Hackathon hosted by SatoshiLabs in Prague. Our goal in going there was of course to see if we could add support for Steem to the Trezor, and I'm happy to report that we were able to do so!

Big shoutout to @cass who was the main driver behind the trip but who unfortunately was unable to attend as he got sick just before the Hackathon.

Trezor image
Image © Copyright SatoshiLabs.

What we achieved

There's still a fair amount of work left to be done for full integration, but we were able to successfully generate a set of keys and sign a Steem transfer using the Trezor! The Trezor firmware is coded in C, and while neither of us have much experience with C, @xeroc proved to be an absolute coding machine who was able to make all the changes necessary to add support for Steem. The main hurdle was the serialisation and signing of transactions, but since @xeroc already implemented all of that Python he had a good grasp of what was required.

By the end of the Hackathon we were able to sign a transfer from one of @xeroc's accounts to another one, which you can see in this screenshot:

First ever Steem transaction signed by a Trezor!

The road forward

What @xeroc and I intend to work on in the coming weeks and months is:

Finishing the firmware integration
Ensuring full test coverage of firmware
Adding Piston support
Adding a web interface
Expand support to other Graphene blockchains (BTS, PeerPlays etc)

What's this Trezor thing?

For those of you who don't know what the Trezor is, it's a hardware wallet that allows you to store your Bitcoin and other crypto currencies while also allowing you to sign transactions in a completely secure manner. It's a brilliant device made by a group of really cool and very talented people from Prague, including Bitcoin celebs like stick (alchemist cryptographer and the genius who invented the Trezor), slush (inventor of pooled mining and owner of SlushPool) and johoe (the white hat hacker who hacked and returned bitcoin from blockchain.info) and of course Alena, co-founder of SatoshiLabs and business developer!

If you have a lot of money in Bitcoin you should definitely consider using a Trezor to store them!

You can read more about the Trezor Hackathon on the SatoshiLabs blog