Should you use an ETH_sign on the MetaMask wallet? from leodenial's blog

Signing a transaction on any platform allows you to validate the request for that particular transaction. By enabling this feature, you will be asked to sign every transaction that is made from your account so that you can ultimately avoid making any transaction by mistake or get to know about unauthorized transaction attempts from your account. Similarly, there is such a feature in your MetaMask wallet that allows you to sign the transaction for their successful processing.

But, is it really as safe as it sounds? Is there any security concern attached to it? Let's find that out.

Does MetaMask use the ETH_sign feature?

Well, surely does use the ETH_sign feature as a security practice in its wallet. However, this feature has been disabled as the default feature so that MetaMask wallet users have the full choice of whether or not they wish to use it. But, the real question is why have they turned it off?

Well, when we talk about the past, we get to know that the Web3 world was quite different from how it works today. At that time, the team of developers had no idea that the ETH_sign feature could turn out to be something harmful to users.

Should you use ETH_sign?

Well, this is yet another question that needs to be answered and understood as soon as you set up your wallet. In this context, first of all, you need to understand the fact that the ETH_sign request that you get is actually not in a human-readable form. So,MetaMask wallet  it becomes next to impossible for a user to understand what he is signing and hence this makes it a pretty weird as well as dangerous action.

Hence, whenever you are interacting with a decentralized application and you have enabled this signing on MetaMask wallet, there are chances that you might lose all your cryptos and NFTs because you are signing something that you cannot read at all.

Security measures you need to be aware of 

If you ever think of enabling the ETH_sign request in your MetaMask wallet, you need to be extra careful with it. Here are some of the security measures that you need to take into consideration beforehand:

• First of all, make sure that you have carried out thorough research of the dapp for which you are using it 
• Also, make sure that the platform which is asking you to enable this feature actually requires you to turn on this feature and what is the purpose why it needs this feature to be turned on 
• If you think that a transaction cannot be made without using it, then you need to make sure to disable it once you are done with that particular transaction on your MetaMask wallet. 

Conclusion: 

Our concluding thought on this particular topic is that you should avoid using the Ethereum signature request at all costs. In case you are planning to use this feature, make sure that you understand its pros and cons well in detail to avoid facing any issues at a later stage.