Trezor Talks: Cybersecurity month recap

Learn about crypto

Listen back to our live chats with special guests Adam Back, Jameson Lopp and Tropic Square.

Cybersecurity is no longer something to leave to the professionals. Data leaks have begun regularly affecting everyone from governments to credit companies, banks to social media platforms. The only way to ensure your data is safe is to control it yourself, and keep as much of it offline as possible.

To help make sense of the growing importance of cybersecurity in our daily lives — further amplified by the use of cryptocurrency — Trezor spent Cybersecurity Awareness Month speaking with some of the industry’s leading experts about bitcoin security, covering everything from social engineering to voltage-glitching.

Below, you can listen back to each of our Cybersecurity Awareness Month Twitter Spaces and learn from the experts: Adam Back, Jameson Lopp, secure chip company Tropic Square, and Trezor co-founder Pavol Rusnak. We’ve included a summary of talking points to help you navigate the topics that most interest you.

Questions from listeners can also be heard at the end of these talks. We will be returning to Twitter with more spaces and more unmissable guests towards the end of November. Be sure to follow our Twitter account and set a reminder so you can join our next discussion and ask questions directly to our guests.

Modern encryption and Bitcoin

Adam Back, CEO of Blockstream and Pavol Rusnak, CTO of SatoshiLabs

How did you find out about Bitcoin? For Adam Back, it was directly from Satoshi Nakomoto himself, in one of the first recorded email conversations with Bitcoin’s creator. Adam is a long-time cypherpunk whose project Hashcash was the basis for Bitcoin’s proof-of-work mechanism. He is joined by Pavol Rusnak, better known as Stick, one of the inventors of the first hardware wallet, Trezor.

This two-hour conversation with two of the most prolific engineers in the industry covers the place of encryption in our society, as a means of verification as well as an instrument of resistance. Why should the general public care about encryption? How can we make securing Bitcoin easier and drive adoption? Why does bitcoin use elliptic-curve cryptography and what does Schnorr do? Find answers to all of these questions and more in our most popular talk so far.

Building a transparent and auditable chip at Tropic Square

Evžen Englberth, CEO of Tropic Square; Jan Pleskač, CTO of Tropic Square

Securing data against every form of attack imaginable is hard. Tropic Square is taking on the security industry under the leadership of Evžen Englberth and Jan Pleskač, who join us to discuss their upcoming secure element prototype. As Jameson Lopp covers in the final talk below, an incredible amount of effort goes into ensuring that just a few specific kilobytes of data are kept completely secure. Listen below as Jan and Evžen pick apart the challenges of transparent security, and address the challenges of chip manufacturing.

Tropic Square is currently taking inquiries from companies interested in working on a bespoke implementation of their TASSIC chip solution. Visit tropicsquare.com to contact the team. Learn more about what’s going on with chips and crypto hardware in general in our blog, how the global chip shortage affects crypto hardware.

How the global chip shortage affects crypto hardware

Making self-custody safe

Jameson Lopp, CTO of Casa

As the CTO of Bitcoin security company Casa, Jameson Lopp’s work is focused on both the technical challenge of securing data as well as advocating for individuals to take security more seriously in their everyday life. This space offers listeners Jameson’s opinions and advice for individuals who want to do self-custody right and limit their exposure to hacks and scams, without getting overwhelmed by the ever-more-technical tools available to experts.

As we’ve covered in our recent blogs about crypto crimes such as direct message scams, the rise of fake apps and software and our latest piece about how to avoid phishing, the digital asset ecosystem is a major target for cybercriminals. Don’t get baited by social engineering — take a leaf out of Jameson’s book and start addressing the vulnerabilities with a personal OpSec strategy.

Recognize and avoid phishing

Stay tuned for more episodes

Twitter spaces have enabled us to be more present within the community, and we are eager to commit to many more conversations in future. Open discussions with experts and audiences from across the crypto spectrum is priceless and we look forward to presenting many more of the interconnected people, projects and technologies that make up SatoshiLabs and Trezor.

Our talks are intended to help individuals be more comfortable and secure when using bitcoin, so we invite users like you to come and speak with us and voice your ideas. Together we can make self-custody even easier and pave the way to a future where everyone has control of their money.

Trezor Talks: Cybersecurity month recap was originally published in Trezor Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.