Topic· 9 essays

Digital asset custody

The largest custody losses did not involve stolen keys. They involved signers approving one thing and signing another. These essays cover payload binding, blind signing, revocation and the limits of key-splitting.

Start here What each standard proves is the reference piece behind this topic.

All 9 essays

Crypto

The payload flip: signing what you did not see

The largest digital asset thefts did not involve stolen keys. Signers held their hardware, reviewed a web interface, and signed something else.

Crypto

Pre-signed transactions that never expire defeat timelocks

A governance timelock assumes a delay gives people time to react. A transaction signed once and held indefinitely removes the delay entirely.

Comparison

Descriptor registries solve blind signing by adding a dependency

Clear-signing standards let a wallet render a contract call by looking up a descriptor — which becomes part of the trust boundary.

Crypto

Address poisoning works because humans check the ends

Nobody reads a forty-character address. They check the first four and the last four, which is exactly the check an attacker can defeat by brute force.

Crypto

A hardware wallet protects the key, not the decision

The security model of a hardware signer is key isolation. Understanding a complex contract call is a problem it is not built to solve.

Crypto

Domain separation only works if the executing contract checks it

Typed data signing puts a chain identifier in its domain separator. Some implementations cache it at deployment and never re-check it.

Crypto

The custody API is the perimeter, and it authenticates a server

Institutional custody platforms allow programmatic withdrawals within policy. The credential making those calls sits on a server.

Comparison

Splitting the key does not decide whether to sign

Multi-party computation removes the single point of key compromise. It says nothing about whether the transaction being signed is the one anyone intended.

Crypto

What an examiner wants to see for a large transfer

Supervisory expectations for virtual currency businesses include non-repudiable records for significant transactions.

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