The Ethereum community presents a feature to eliminate blind signing

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The Ethereum community has introduced Clear Signing, a security feature that ensures users clearly understand transaction details before signing, replacing unreadable hexadecimal data and reducing the risks associated with blind signing attacks.

“Transaction approval is supposed to be the last line of defense in controlling what happens to your assets on the blockchain. When it’s done blindly, this defense doesn’t work” – Ethereum Foundation he said on Tuesday, calling blind signing a “structural flaw” that contributed to billions in losses, including last year’s $1.4 billion Bybit hack.

The “What You See Is What You Sign” security feature aims to solve this problem and is integrated with several self-service crypto wallets, including Ledger, Trezor, and MetaMask.

Source: Ethereum Foundation

The security feature comes as bad actors attack the crypto industry with increasingly sophisticated hacks and scams, despite significant improvements in security measures in recent years.

Since 2009, state-backed workers in North Korea have stolen more than $7 billion in funds, much of which came from cryptographic protocols. The Bybit hack was the largest cryptocurrency heist, involving a breach of a third-party service provider’s security and manipulation of transaction signatures.

Trezor’s chief technology officer, Tomáš Sušánka, told Cointelegraph that attackers are constantly exploiting this because there is no widely available security feature that can distinguish malicious shrewd contracts from legitimate transactions.

This issue has led users to “unknowingly sign transactions and lose everything,” Sušánka said, adding that the Clear Signature feature “directly addresses this issue by making transactions human-readable before committing.”

Clear Signing was introduced as part of the Ethereum Foundation’s Trillion Dollar Security Initiative and initiated by Ledger via the open-source ERC-7730 token standard.

The foundation said the key elements of the Clear Signing feature include “human-readable transaction descriptions” and a “neutral, mirrorable registry of descriptors.”

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It also provides an attestation framework that enables auditors to verify these descriptors.

Many crypto platforms support Clear Signing

Several other cryptocurrency wallets and Ethereum privacy and security platforms have contributed to the Clear Signing feature, including Keycard, WalletConnect, Argot, Sourcify, Zama, ZKnox, and Fireblocks.

Sušánka said Trezor is trying to implement this safeguard before June 30.

“We are implementing this standard because it is the right thing to do for our users,” Sušánka said, before calling Clear Signing “a key security advancement for our entire industry.”

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