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Get Your Security Hardware!
This document is a guide on what hardware devices you will need to step up your personal security game.
For security questions and comments, ask away in the #security channel within Status. There will be no judgement, or blaming. This is about personal security education
Yubikey 5 NFC
The Yubikey 5 NFC is an near field channel (NFC) enabled hardware device that drastically increases the security of logging into various services.
In short, when enabled for services, you are no longer able to login without authenticating with this physical device, making it virtually impossible for someone to hijack your account for that service without first stealing this device.
For newer Mac users: they have a USB-c option, but I would recommend getting the USB-a option as it will work better across multiple devices, and is more crush resistant.
Ledger Hardware Wallet
https://www.ledger.com/products/ledger-nano-s/
A hardware wallet is a device that holds all of your blockchain related private keys, and never exposes them to the internet. These are typically backed up using a "recovery phrase" that consists of \ge 12 random words from a dictionary.
When you need to send a transaction, a software client forms the valid transaction and submits it to the hardware wallet to be signed, which is checked and verified (most of the time on device) to make sure everything is ok, and the user enters a pin and signs off the "OK."
The Ledger Nano S is perfectly sufficient for these needs, as it handles multiple chains, and is the most popular hardware wallet currently, and has integrations with most wallet services to access your tokens and cryptocurrencies.
Printer without wifi
When working with cryptocurrency and blockchain technology, you will inevitably have to print recovery phrases (mnemonics, seed phrases, etc). You will also want to print out 2FA codes for Google Authenticator.
It is important to do so on a printer that has no wifi as the history can be hijacked and the printed documents can be recovered and reprinted.
Recommendations:
- HP DeskJet 1112 Compact Printer (F5S23A)