Daniel Khesin – Bitfi’s not-CEO – has recently started differentiating Bitfi as the only one that can protect against state actors.

But why would he be recovering it? He is not the threat. The threat are state actors. Nobody expects Cybergibbons to crawl through their window and do something. No one gives a shit about you. Government seizure or someone else with those resources and it will all be taken.

— Daniel Khesin (@KhesinDaniel) July 13, 2019

This doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.

Daniel keeps on talking about “forensic labs” that can recover keys from Trezor’s STM32 MCU. This is a feasible task.

Yes you are promoting it. I don’t care what elaborate methods you have for storing your 0.0001 BTC. I do know that Bitfi stores nothing. And your Trezor will not hold up to forensic methods. Just be honest and say Trezor is only good for online attacks. Even then it has issues…

— Daniel Khesin (@KhesinDaniel) July 14, 2019

He also claims a “secure element” does very little to stop extraction. Recovering data from most secure elements is beyond the means of nearly every lab in the world. Those that could carry it out will be charging very large sums of money.

1/ First, a secure element does very little to stop extraction. Second, the whole argument against SE and why companies use off the shelf microcontrollers (usually from STM) is because firmware is open source. Benefit of that is you can audit the source, unlike with a secure

— Daniel Khesin (@KhesinDaniel) July 14, 2019

Finally, he claims that anything typed into a computing device can be recovered. As of 2019, there are no labs on this earth who can recover data from the RAM inside a powered down MCU.

And as we have learned, being solely focused on this, anything you type into some kind of computing device is retrievable with forensic methods unless complex memory management is handled properly which is not easy..

— Daniel Khesin (@KhesinDaniel) July 13, 2019

But, let’s assume these labs exist.

There are three serious logical errors here.

Firstly, how does the state actor have such advanced capabilities in recovering data from a secure element, but are unable to backdoor a Bitfi?

If a state actor wants to access your funds on Bitfi, all they need to do is backdoor the device. We showed how easy this was last year. It’s a much easier attack than cold boot.

Secondly, if a state actor wants your funds, they are either going to get them or make your life unpleasant. In other words, YOU’RE STILL GONNA GET MOSSAD’ED UPON.

Thirdly, if these labs are capable of recovering anything typed into a computing device, this means that these same labs can recover the seed and phrase from a Bitfi.

Bitfi have created a threat model to which their own device is incredibly vulnerable to.