Ethereum Community Unveils Feature to End Blind Signing

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

North Korean state-backed workers have stolen over $7 billion in funds alone since 2009, with a large share of that coming from crypto protocols. The Bybit hack was its largest crypto heist by compromising a third-party service provider and manipulating transaction signatures.

Trezor chief technology officer Tomáš Sušánka told Cointelegraph that attackers have been exploiting this relentlessly due to there not being a widely accessible security feature that is capable of distinguishing malicious smart contracts from legitimate transactions.

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

The Clear Signing feature was introduced through the Ethereum Foundations Trillion Dollar Security Initiative and initiated by Ledger through the open-source ERC-7730 token standard.

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

It also includes an attestation framework enabling auditors to verify those descriptors.

A host of crypto platforms are supporting Clear Signing

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

Sušánka said Trezor seeks to implement the security feature before June 30.

“We‘re implementing this standard because it’s the right thing to do for our users,” Sušánka said before calling the Clear Signing feature a “critical security advancement for our entire industry.”