No matter whether you like or hate or don't care about cryptocurrencies, this is incredible stuff...
Now basically: every single attack that's been described as "theoretical" or "far-fetched" or "only existing in the mind of a paranoid person" did actually happen.
We're talking here about a tiny eSIM implant and a little CPU doing OCR on the fonts appearing on the hardware wallet's screen to read the secrets during set up. So the secure element ain't tampered with.
Not long ago the Coldcard hardware wallet had an issue where it'd fallback to a 32-bit only RNG that could be cracked and so many people got their coins stolen.
Now it's Ledger that sees tampered devices all around the world (in Asia for sure but now there are reports about reseller in the EU selling backdoored/eSIM'ed devices).
For people who own Bitcoin at this point one of the only thing kinda sensible to do is to use multisig schemes, like 2-of-2 or 3-of-3 multisig, where your split the secret over two or three different hardware wallet brands (meaning being able to sign a 2-of-2 wallets requires hardware wallets from two different vendors).
When Ledger hardware wallets came out and people said that seed (the list of words) could be intercepted and relayed by a channel bypassing the computer (here by using an eSIM), people would post explaining that people were nuts if they thought such an attack could be pulled off.
Yet here we are.
And Ledger is responsible for very poor security practices: for example it's impossible to use a Ledger hardware wallet in a fully airgapped/offline way. For you're forced to not only upgrade the firmware but also install the Bitcoin "ledger app" (or whatever that is called) after you entered your seed into the device.
Which is complete and total amateur hour.
In addition to that Ledger offers a service to "backup your seed": what could possibly go wrong with that uh?
I'm betting that we'll soon hear about hardware wallets getting drained due to the seed being exfiltrated through "randomness" in how transactions are built/signed (aka "kleptography").
And it's not just representative about people in the cryptocurrencies ecosystem: people simply don't understand computer security and don't understand the potential attacks nor the length at which attackers are willing to go to steal data/funds/ruin other people's lives.
At this point we've heard about chips' plans being modified before the chips are even built (only to lower the entropy of RNGs) [unrelated to cryptocurrencies btw], a worldwide backdoor attempt in SSH, eSIM sending secrets from hardware wallets with tiny attack surfaces.
It speaks a lot to the power of financial incentives. As soon as there's money in it, every conceivable attack to get that money has been tried. Which also mimics what happens in market economies: once there is money in it, every conceivable industry springs up, even things that are absurd or harmful. And money appears to be more powerful than things like laws or governments, in that things that are illegal but profitable happen, while things that are legal and unprofitable do not.
In some ways this is kinda encouraging, because it means that even in cases where society collapses and the government disappears, there are really only two fundamental technologies needed to reboot everything: money and contracts.
I kind of get what you're saying, though I'm not sure how much value money would have without a government to back it up. This is true even for cryptocurrencies. If society collapses and I can't convert to some fiat currency, I don't think I'd trade a bitcoin for six slices of bread.
The incentives lead us toward the classic "Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders." scenario.
A currency can arise from any fungible, tradable, generally-durable commodity that the bulk of society decides to accept as being worthwhile. In prisons cigarettes often fill that role; in pre-agrarian hunter gatherer groups it's often little baubles like shells. Government isn't necessary for this, but social contract is. You need to have enough faith that your neighbor will accept the currency to accept it yourself.
Cryptocurrencies have the advantage that they can be spent worldwide, instantaneously, with little friction, while most commodities require that you be physically present to exchange them. They're also significantly easier to store and more resistant to garden-variety theft, as long as they're secured by passphrases. But they exist in the uncanny valley of requiring electricity and Internet. It is fairly unlikely that the government collapses and yet you still retain always-on electricity and Internet. What will you use to pay the electric company, and how do you enforce the contract that they keep providing you power?
There's perhaps an interesting role for a digital cryptocurrency that does not require always-on connectivity, eg. something that can be carried over SneakerNet for local transactions, and then automatically syncs up with the global system when the community regains Internet connectivity. In actual conflict zones today, people seem to get intermittent electrical & Internet connectivity, eg. the electricity will come on for an hour a day with rolling blackouts, and then you try to get everything charged in that one hour. And there are enough solar installations out there that several communities are likely to retain significant power even in the event of a societal collapse. But current crypto's consensus mechanisms aren't built for intermittent connectivity: you'd need to build and design something that is eventually consistent, where a weeks-long fork does not result in two competing cryptocurrencies.
> I'm not sure how much value money would have without a government to back it up.
You don't need a government backed paper currency, you need a mint making precious metal coins. History has several examples like the mints at the Potosí silver mines or those by the East India Company that enabled trade without effective governments to back them up by just providing reliable coinage for trade.
As long as there isn't some crazy inflationary force like colonizers arriving with an unlimited supply, we can use something as simple as beads or seashells for currency quite fine. It just means more labor overhead to create that currency in the first place.
Sir Terry predicted this, in his C. M. O. T. Dibbler character[0].
I was just thinking about click fraud, and how I'll bet that a significant number of clicks on sites are now being driven by simple (they don't need to be too complicated) LLMs.
I don't own any crypto, but if I did, I'd probably choose to use a multisig setup with 2+ signers, including at least one (regularly pentested) software wallet.
I don't get hardware wallets that have you enter the key on another device. Or don't show the transaction on the hardware device's screen, with every destination and amount, with a button to confirm on the device. Or trusting a wallet to generate a random seed. Or not using the most entropy possible (e.g. 24-word seed). Anything less is dropping the ball.
This is a big part of my problem with crypto and why I'm bearish on it breaking through to normies. Traditional financial institutions just seem so much safer all in all, not to mention having far better UX.
Is it? The theory and even the implementation is literally a gas station credit card skimmer for crypto. I do agree that anyone dismissing attacks on Ledger was foolish, but mostly because Ledger is an obviously low-quality product on even a cursory inspection, not because we need to become even more paranoid conspiracy theorists.
Not sure if your comment invalidates the context: your iPhone app (or hardware or iOS, etc) could have a bug that was not discovered yet. It's all about attack vectors, and opponent motivation and resources.
Multiple crypto-experts said that the safest crypto wallet is a recent iPhone in airplane mode which is only used for this purpose. Because it's much harder to implant that your average hardware crypto wallet.
On the other hand, the attack surface of an iPhone is huge compared to a dedicated hardware wallet, and it's hard to keep it in airplane mode and actually transact your coins.
How about if you build your own airgapped hw wallet? There should be plenty folks here who would be capable of doing so. (Doesn't even have to be the most hardened and audited implementation ever since you won't release this to anybody.) This makes you vulnerable to purely very targetted attacks.
As long as the cost of sucha single-target attack isn't substantially below its potential upside, you should be safe.
Otoh, it's only meaningful if you have more than just toy assets in there.
There should be a range between those two though that would contain lots of folks comfortably.
The hardware is much more sophisticated, miniaturized, and high-speed, and the supply chain is much more generic; a Ledger is a really primitive piece of hardware with a simple display interface and a ton of empty space inside it. An iPhone has no wasted space and extremely high-speed onboard buses that would be hard to sniff. Additionally, with Ledger, you know that every customer is going to be using the device to access crypto, so it's an easy target nearer the head of the supply chain. With an iPhone, you have no idea what end-user to target the implant against.
You can walk in to an official Apple store and buy an iphone direct almost anywhere in the world. Crypto thieves would have to have compromised the entirety of Apple's supply chain and found space inside the iphone to fit a whole spy chip (of which there is basically none).
I'm going to guess it's a number's game, you might be able to do it with an iPhone but it's not guaranteed to go to a crypto user, whereas the other one is a bespoke system for the purpose.
> No matter whether you like or hate or don't care about cryptocurrencies, this is incredible stuff...
> Now basically: every single attack that's been described as "theoretical" or "far-fetched" or "only existing in the mind of a paranoid person" did actually happen.
Huh? Nothing here is theoretical or far-fetched. Hardware attacks of this sort have been documented for decades and basically part-and-parcel for most intelligence agencies, from the US govt installing backdoors in Cisco hardware to the exploding pagers for Hamas. This is not even the first hardware wallet attack documented on the internet (although it might be the largest-scale one).
It's just that hardware attacks are complicated, expensive, and risky, so they're usually done in a targeted manner. The only news here is that the crypto community painted a gigantic target on their backs by inventing a currency that can be taken from them with zero recourse, broadcasting it to the world that they own a lot of it, and then buying cheap hardware from overseas retailers to "protect" their assets. So all of sudden, it was profitable and relatively low-risk to cast a wider net.
It's fascinating in the sense that we're discovering from first principles why the financial system works the way it does. The damage caused by cryptocurrencies has been really pretty staggering, for little real benefit.
It is far-fetched because it is an attack by thieves on consumers, not a state intelligence agency and intelligence targets. It's far-fetched for me to fly an B-2 bomber, but it's been commonplace for US government for decades.
I remember chatting with about AI a few months ago about the issue of foreign RAM sticks being able to cooperate with websites to serve different files/instructions, undetectably. Scary stuff.
> Now basically: every single attack that's been described as "theoretical" or "far-fetched" or "only existing in the mind of a paranoid person" did actually happen.
It's predictable: The ROI of attacking cryptocurrencies in this manner is high enough to make expensive attacks worthwhile. It doesn't make other expensive attacks on typical end-users worthwhile, and they remain far-fetched.
Back in the day, RSA SecurID hardware tokens were completely physically sealed, with no room for a backdoor. Tampering with them in any ways destroys them or makes it physically obvious. That's a physically secure design. This Ledger thing looks more like a consumer toy.
Not to contradict your point, but in 2011 RSA's SecurID backend servers were hacked. TOTPs require shared secrets, and their server had all the secrets to the SecurID keyfobs they managed. Security is hard.
> or "only existing in the mind of a paranoid person" did actually happen.
This reminds me of the 2020 case where a union organizer thought there was a spy camera inside a utility pole outside his house. It was in a conspiracy subreddit, so it seemed like the deranged ramblings of a ravingly-paranoid stranger. But they found the addresses of the IP cams and had plenty of evidence to corroborate it.
Now, Flock cameras are just normal.
I think the 2020s will be defined by this trend. "Things which only existed in the minds of a paranoid person" becoming normal parts of daily life.
Most large cities in the world have had thousands of public CCTV cameras for decades. Traffic enforcement cameras have been super normal for even longer.
This is why I sold my bitcoin early - all those years of reading Phrack. Sure, it was $300 at the time and I could have made more, but I had no idea how to securely _store_ it. Still don't.
Not mentioned in article: MediaMarkt, the German equivalent of Best Buy, was selling these compromised devices on store shelves in every city in Germany.
Selling Ledger wallets or compromised Ledger wallets? My understanding was a reputable reseller (Cryptobilis) was bought and then the wallets were modified via the reseller chain. This isn’t on Ledger it’s a (literal) supply chain attack. Unless MediaMarkt was buying via the reseller?
"We're talking here about a tiny eSIM implant and a little CPU doing OCR on the fonts appearing on the hardware wallet's screen to read the secrets during set up. So the secure element ain't tampered with."
...is accurate...it's one of the rare times I'd agree there's nothing they can do. And I was all prepared to storm in here saying "convenient excuse!"
The device should have bricked itself after someone opened it up to put hidden stuff inside. Also showing the key phrase to the user instead of keeping it secret to the secure element is a questionable decision.
people do need the option to repair devices, especially when they contain valuable information, so I don't see an automatic bricking to be a reasonable solution
I would love to know if I can use one of this to get unlimited data worldwide.
Jokes aside, keystone wallets are air gapped. And not air gapped but awesome the lesser known but imo best of all, gridplus lattice1.
Heck, even a trezor, despite their mail provider being hacked, is better.
I, however, dont endorse the iPhone idea.
Just don’t buy ledger, terrible company. Many of my friends are getting endless spam because of them. The key backup is a disaster after they promised it was not possible to retrieve it. Their software stack is closed source.
This is imo the last nail in the coffin for them. They should refund all the money lost, and issue a worldwide recall.
There's a medium. Something ironically close to apple's 'non fully approved and supply chained repair' thing (especially when we consider the case of a screen that could be OCRing data and tossing it out later).
'You have unexpected components. You may want to have your device inspected or risking compromise of x/y/z. Should we continue or lock it down'?
I'd assume a company like that would have insurance for this. They'd be able to reimburse the customer knowing they'd get paid back from an insurance claim. That is, if they are actually insured for these kinds of losses.
A few years ago, the Canon camera battery supply chain was intermingled with knock offs. The seller I bought from was exchanging for legit batteries or reimbursement when a customer made a claim.
Why doesn't it surprise me that the shittiest company Media Markt is somehow involved in this. These guys are about to close shop anyway, rest in piss Mediamarkt.
I had a similar idea to bypass DRM for a while. Some kind of board that goes between the display panel driver and whatever sends it the signal, and outputs something you can capture, e.g. DVI or unencrypted HDMI. Not sure how practical it is.
In the past (circa a few years ago) the connection between the main board for a display and the glass driver board would be a ribbon cable, LVDS signalling. Very straightforward and typically not soldered. There'd be a ribbon cable connector. So yeah, you could just put a board between easily. And there are LVDS to H264/H265 chips already.
But as the other comment points out, older HDCP is broken wide open so ... easier to just use that. Plenty HDCP strippers on the market.
This whole operation smells Israeli from the beginning to the end. First are these USB ledgers with modified hardware (guess who likes to do that on pagers and similar), then this happens in Germany, the country that never says "no" to the same specific group of people and finally they try exfiltrate the stolen funds with the favorite "private" coin of the same group of people, which in end is (again) proven to NOT be private at all.https://x.com/YFarmX/status/2108918564015006200
HN will never permit to look into the origin of this criminal action and normies will not even put that possibility on the table because they've been programmed against it. Let's play a game, this is a serious criminal act. I bet this will be quickly forgoten in about 3 weeks without anyone in Germany pointing fingers to the guilty party.
Hardware wallets are not a solution to self-custody.
If one would make a list of things that can go wrong, starting from the supply chain that delivers parts to the manufacturer, malicious employees at the manufacturer, mistakes the manufacturer can make, attacks on the delivery chain from the manufacturer to the user, to mistakes the user can make creating, using and storing their keys - the list would contain hundreds of points.
Passkeys don’t gate immutable financial transactions. (Pretty much everything you do in a bank’s website is reversible during the day to a few days out.)
> Hardware wallets are not a solution to self-custody.
Nothing in this world tends to be "the solution", everything has tradeoffs.
Say you want to do self-custody, what is then the best option? "Don't do self-custody" obviously isn't the solution, as the core use case here is self-custody, so what in your opinion is a better way, than hardware wallets?
If there is nothing better today than hardware wallets, then for now, they are "one of the better solutions" for how to do self-custody, even with the current tradeoffs. But again, I'm eager to hear what the alternatives are.
From a bird's-eye perspective, 3 things are needed: Create a key, derive an address from the key, store the key.
Creating a key safely is possible with dice. You would probably create a seed phrase instead of a key directly, but for this discussion it is the same.
Deriving an address from the key is hard and I have not yet seen a good protocol on how to do it. I have read through a bunch of descriptions of how people do it and they are all weak and brittle. The most popular seems to be "I order a hardware wallet and follow the instructions that come with it". But even people who put a lot of thought into it come up with weak and brittle approaches.
I would think there is a way to do it safely. But I have never seen a description of one yet. It might involve multiple computers, multiple software implementations and a hell of a lot of work to create a multisig that is not prone to a single attack vector.
Storing the key is probably the hardest. The most popular way seems to be to store it in a drawer or a safe. So now those coins are just as safe as a piece of gold would be. Or they use a multisig and store the keys in multiple locations. Quite painful. As you have the ongoing problem of keeping those locations accessible and safe at the same time.
Again, "best solution we have available" for self-custody is hardware wallets, so we're back to square one.
Imagine if I tried to discuss and argue about things like this on a TypeScript submission? "No, this won't actually solve the problems of TS" I say, "What is the solution then?" someone asks me and I reply "There is no real solutions to those problems, just use Clojure, problems avoided!", completely missing the point.
Banks and payment providers (Visa Mastercard AMX) provide services beyond simply a store of wealth and a mechanism to transfer it.
Actually 2FA, hardware biometrics, behaviour based fraud prevention and personal confirmation of suspicious transactions. If you’re using credit they can refund fraudulent transactions, and there is the chargeback mechanism. This is probably banking system dependent, but in AUS there is a refund mechanism for mistaken/fraudulent traditional bank transactions.
BTC has effectively none of the safety net, and humans are fallible. We need the safety net. It’s the hugest barrier to adoption. Exchanges do a far better job of managing the risks than trusting your wealth to a hardware wallet.
In financial systems with a basis in law, no transaction is ever final. It doesn't matter what the protocol says or what the technology is capable of, if the judge says that the transaction must be reversed, you get it reversed, even if that means delivering cash in briefcases or something like that.
In systems with a basis in technology, final means final. If the North Koreans take your money, your money is taken.
> In systems with a basis in technology, final means final. If the North Koreans take your money, your money is taken.
This seems obviously not true. If someone in New York steals your money then courts in New York can order them to give it back even if it's Bitcoin. If they don't comply then they get held in contempt until they do or the police seize their computer with the keys on it etc.
If the person who stole it is in North Korea then the courts with jurisdiction would be the ones in North Korea, which may not be to your advantage, but how is it any different from what happens after the money was transferred to a bank in North Korea? Or, for that matter, what happens if someone in North Korea has the stolen money deposited into a US account and then spends it before you get around to reversing the transaction?
The problem isn't what kind of technology you use, it's that someone can transfer stolen assets into a jurisdiction that won't help you get them back. Regardless of what payment system you use, they can get the same effect by using the stolen money to buy gold bullion or similar and have it shipped to them in their jurisdiction, and once it crosses the border they're not giving it back.
> if the judge says that the transaction must be reversed, you get it reversed, even if that means delivering cash in briefcases or something like that
So if I pay cash for something, I can get it back if a judge orders the counterparty to do so.
Why is cryptocurrency not the same? Can I not go to a court and get an order, exactly the same?
Of course I may not know the counterparty's identity or they may be in a hostile jurisdiction, but how is that different to cash that has escaped my jurisdiction?
I have worked for and/or audited the majority of exchanges, that mostly white-label a much smaller number of players.
I have yet to see a single one, not one, that had a system of custody that did not allow any one of hundreds of people, most not even employees, to walk away with all of the funds.
There are no standards for security that apply to crypto custodians and the mostly fail to do the bare minimums.
If you use even a top ten custodian, operate under the assumption that the funds are in multi billion dollar plaintext wallets sitting on AWS servers the whole team has ssh access to from the same laptops they "npm install" random shit to all day.
Honestly if you do not feel confident custodying crypto yourself, you should probably not own any.
And if you do feel confident, you probably shouldn't own crypto either.
Even if you are not hacked, or otherwise lose access to the funds, they are not unlikely to become worthless simply due to the system with the stable coins collapsing.
The liquidity can easily disappear, much more so than with Fiat currency or other assets linked to real economies.
You cannot protect yourself from being scammed in that way, even if you do hold on to your keys.
The safety net makes you less secure against the U.S. government, but more secure against everyone else. That's the right choice for almost all users, but I still think it's at least kind of good that people have a choice.
I’m not saying they are perfect, but on aggregate they are better than hardware wallets. Legally they will be responsible if your money is lost. They are about as close as you can get to the type of legal assurances provided by a bank.
Anacdote, I have a friend who is a locksmith. I needed his services one day, gave him a call, and it turned out his day job had evolved since I last talked to him 5 years ago.
Basically, he was now just a safe cracker. He is a a locksmith, but 100% of his full time hours are cracking safes. He didn’t even carry around the stuff in his van to repin a lock. He gave me mates rates but the shop had to do it.
This man was attending multiple callouts, per day, to crack into a safe. Because of, you guessed it, human fallibility.
In a city with with millions of people, basically a hundreds of people needed a single locksmiths service because they had locked themselves out of there own “personal store of wealth”.
I’ve heard zero such examples through traditional banking, with the exception of stolen cards.
Hardware wallets are air-gapped. The issue here was a distributor got acquired and then snuck a chip in that could read the spi link between the microcontroller and the screen. The chip had its own cellular modem and could send the passphrase that was shown on the screen to the attackers.
If you sell a device specifically for storing large amounts of liquid assets, that puts a huge target on that device. You are basically asking for supply chain attacks
An ordinary MacBook does not have that issue. If you are a high-value target, you can further decrease your risk profile by buying it from a random physical store, further preventing targeted attacks.
Boy that was a slog, to dig deep enough through the slop to find the technical details…
In retrospect @gigachad’s summary is worth as much as both articles combined, but for the Clauded technical source (with pictures!) that Ledger’s Claude-release refers to:
https://www.tibane.net/research/ledger-nano-x-implant
Nobody said hardware wallets aren't air-gapped. They said take something normal and usual enough not to be an attractive target for bespoke crypto stealers, and then airgap that to make your wallet.
airgapped pre crypto devices are extra safe: break out the ti82! don’t buy a ti82 for this purpose, it has to be one you had in your closet. If a blog post describes how to code it in TiBasic then affiliate links a calculator in ebay, well…
If there was one, someone would write down the steps necessary and put them on the internet. But I have never seen a sound description of how to self-custody Bitcoin in a safe way.
The hardest part seems to not even be the one that currently creates all those problems - the hardware and software used. The hardest part is storing the key (for example a seed phrase). If anyone says they know a way to safely store Bitcoin, my first question is: How do you store the key?
The sensitivity of my bank password is much lower than a seed phrase because most bank transactions can be reversed as long as I notice them in time and prove my identity to my bank.
With bitcoin nothing is reversible so every step of the process is a huge security risk where you can fall off a cliff and experience financial permadeath of "your" crypto, assuming a sufficiently motivated attacker.
get a brand new, cheap laptop or machine (even a raspberry pi works) that you randomly pickup at the store (no delivery order). Install debian 13, install electrum, airgap the device, reboot and generate 1-of-2 your wallet keys.
The wipe the device, use any non-debian other linux (or BSD) to generated the 2-of-2 wallet key.
Why would you ever connect it to the internet? Air gap forever. Physically rip out the radio, only load software by CD (ideally not through a USB interface).
MPC or multi-sig is a pretty good solution, you can require a 2/3 sign off from different custody solutions (ie. a hardware, desktop, and mobile wallet)
The existing financial system which provides protection to consumers. Crypto doesn’t solve the problem the general public assumes it does and hype has inflated its value dramatically.
Very often this is not the case. Debit / credit cards payments are quite reversible, but once a person send $100,000 or even $10,000 to a scammer it can be quite hard to recover.
Caused by an account take over? This is letter of the law stuff and something bank (and other financial firms) employees receive specific training on. The customers loss is capped and their bank is on the hook.
For inter-bank transactions involving a scam that causes the customer to “voluntarily” send money it depends on the rail. But US ACH rules cover reversals due to fraud and have pretty substantial rules about it.
All the countries have rules about it. Except if your credentials been compromised it can take weeks before you find out that money gone from your account.
Usually how it goes is if someone hacks your account or steals credit card info. You get refunded. If a scammer convinces you to willingly send the money, you’re out of luck.
The truth is that banks often have pretty bad security and customer service, but the risk of getting caught after stealing crypto is virtually zero when compared to scamming someone’s bank account balance.
Yeah, "everyone" knows that. Except the world har an incredible amount of people who fall for these kinds of scams. And there are less obvious scams around.
I almost fell for a strange scam a while ago. A Steam user by the same name as one of my existing steam friends added me. I assumed it was his second account and accepted. A few days later, he messages me, asking me to participate in a DOTA2 tournament. I had previously played DOTA2 with this person, he spoke to me in our shared native language which is not English and everything seemed in order. I said I haven't played DOTA2 in years so I'm beyond rusty, he said I don't have to play, they just need me to register so they have a full team for the signups and then they'll find someone else to play before the tournament starts. Sent me a link to a website requiring a signup and I can't remember what it was now but there was something about the signup that irked me. Maybe it was just creating a account, maybe it required a credit card or something I can't remember but I ended up looking at my steam friends list and noticed both the accounts were online. So I sent a message to the other account asking if this is them, he said no and then I noticed the same scammer had added another mutual friend so I messaged them too warning them about it.
That's the closest I've been to getting scammed that I can recall. I'm not sure what the scammer would gain from my signing up but I'm sure they had some kind of profit angle.
Well as far as I know banks in Europe (UK included) already ask you a lot of questions when you withdraw your money(I.e cash) or even when you wire various amounts( unless you have a good bank manager). My bank manager in Europe just told me straight that I don’t need to explain him anything but he has to call me anyway because of the bank policy(I.e to tick the boxes).
Next is a hold on your suspicious transaction, request additional documents for your own money, basically a lot of AML and KYC before you can use what’s yours.
I understand the reason why they do this but it feels to me you are no longer in control of your money/property and somehow they fail to catch people loading billions from shady sources so I would rather not keep my money in a bank (at least not a retail bank) if I had a sensible option.
Most people don’t care about this until they get trapped just like most people are
/were OK with Paypal and other junk services.
That's not really relevant; the U.S. government has enough leverage over the global (fiat) financial system that they can cause any account in any First World country to be shut down.
The actual reason to discount this is that account shutdowns are flashy rare events that reliably summon HN outrage, and so the kind of person who posts here overweights how likely they are, at least for people not on the margins of society. (If that weren't the case, the system wouldn't work and normal people wouldn't use it.)
About one in five international money transfers fail for me. EU to EU countries. SEPA isn’t bulletproof. Outside office hours I have an even higher failure rate.
Ironically the failure rate when I use the American Visa or MasterCard is maybe 5%.
When there are millions of dollars to be stolen, someone can figure out how to remove the potting.
If need be, just grind and cut till you are back to the one silicon wafer that contains crypto keys, then rebuild the whole lot from scratch, add your evil parts, then re-pot it.
That would work on an already configured wallet that you stole but the skill level required is orders of magnitude higher than what's on display here. I know all of the theory on that one but I would probably not be able to pull that off.
The best I've done is to modify a potted chip by very careful thermal imaging to figure out where the part was that blocked the feature I wanted to unlock (market segmentation) and then drill through the case to a depth just higher than the chip. You'd have definitely been able to spot the difference. This was at the millimeter level. Recently there was a post about a group doing this at the chip level, which I thought was extremely impressive, and again, even with the recipe out there duplicating it would still be very hard.
> The best I've done is to modify a potted chip by very careful thermal imaging to figure out where the part was that blocked the feature I wanted to unlock (market segmentation) and then drill through the case to a depth just higher than the chip.
Sounds like a good approach when you only have a single (or just a few) of the devices so you need to be careful.
With hardware wallets (aka substantial incentive), then the attackers could order a bunch of them for sacrificial zero-ing in the exact places to drill with a CNC/microscope/etc.
> Sounds like a good approach when you only have a single (or just a few) of the devices so you need to be careful.
Yes, initially I had just the one. But once I had it figured out there were lots of other people that wanted their device 'improved' so that jig got used plenty of times. Even so working on other people's hardware always felt very scary, especially poking around with a drill in a sensitive piece of hardware. Even so, they all worked, it was a neat little trick.
This story is a case of someone tampering with devices in the supply chain, before the user first receives them.
What you’re describing is a different thing. It’s an “evil maid” attack, when you tamper with a wallet that is already set up by the user. Also, it would be ultra difficult and expensive.
What you’re saying is possible. But:
It would probably be cheaper to build a total fake Ledger Wallet, then just replace the new real wallet and deliver a fake with a weak entropy generator. Any case, that’s not what has happened this time.
Thanks. I believe you’re right a totally fake copy couldn’t verify. So that idea was wrong.
(The MITM supply chain attack which has happened succeeds because it preserves the original secure hardware but intercepts the secret data at the display interface. But a low-effort mimic of the entire device like I suggested? That wouldn’t work).
Ledger provides a 'Genuine Check' mechanism to determine the authenticity of the device; however, it explicitly warns that it cannot detect added implants when the device's original Secure Element remains intact.
And as this workaround leaves the original Secure Element intact, good luck detecting the supply chain attack.
Yes, this is quite true. Virtual providers are quite easy to set up that way but the amount of KYC for this kind of service is substantial. Even so, these SIMs/eSIMs have turned up in all kinds of bad places such as SIM farms.
These recent teardowns of compromised Ledger wallets are frightening. Because the infiltration of hardware looks very pro. Mass production and standardized parts added.
Even weight difference might not be obvious. He compared weights for one Ledger product but the small variations in weight among genuine devices made comparisons not clear.
Possibly only X-ray would uncover the fake without cracking the case?
Good question: the battery here doesn't look like it had any room for expansion so it wouldn't be worse per se. But normally you want a little bit of room around a battery, I guess a thin foam liner would allow for that and would still allow you to pot the whole thing.
Absolutely and it is why I hate these little pouch cells in wearables. Phones, headphones, in-ear pods, sports gear, toys (which kids take to bed), they're absolutely everywhere and if you look at the way they are usually mounted it is a small miracle there aren't more issues. Powerbanks in particular are a pretty serious hazard.
Not that easy. The potting epoxies made for this purpose are nothing like your regular epoxies. They're pricey and when you try to break them you are very likely to tear the parts right off the board. This is the brand I have used in the past:
The devices we made were put in places where there was a significant risk of tampering and to the best of my knowledge nobody ever managed to break the epoxy bond to the point that the circuit was still functional. But as I wrote above: not cheap.
There are pictures online. And for an unexplainable reason it is the person behind the biggest Bitcoin exchange SNAFU of all times (where hackers stole something like 800 000 Bitcoins), Mark Karpeles of "Mt. Gox" (who did jail time btw), who was the first to post them:
Apparently the hacker did remove the battery and replace it with a smaller one, leaving enough room for the tiny eSIM/LTE modem / OCR chip that did recognition of the secret on screen.
It's definitely AI-written, annoying as fuck god damn it, but the photos are good and the descriptions of the boards, are at least at cursory glance, pretty accurate.
tl;dr Implant is just a little cell phone that does OCR of the hardware wallet's screen during setup to steal the recovery phrases. The implant's design has improved notably three different times before landing on a pretty darn sleek spot-welded overlay that is laminated flat onto the host.
I wonder the lengths smartphone vendors are going to prevent this kind of attack. I cannot imagine it is easy to completely validate hardware in such an elaborate supply chain. I shudder to think about the attack surface in something like a modern car.
It seems unlikely that smartphones would be targeted for such an attack because almost nobody stores large amounts of crypto on their smartphone. Those that do will likely get hacked more traditionally.
TBH, this just sounds to me like the crypto industry is discovering, yet again, why the banking and credit card industry have all this red tape and supply chain security.
Like sure, they're not fully immune... But at least I can call my bank and show them that I didn't suddenly fly from New Mexico to Florida to buy $200 in gift cards from a gas station in the middle of nowhere.
Crypto MUST deal with fraud and hacking if they want to become reliable. At that point, they'll just become another bank with a casino attached.
I can guarantee that if this was open-source, someone or some system would’ve picked it up. I’m still amazed that one guy picked up the XZ Utils backdoor because it slowed down after an update.
My gut reaction is that a hardware implant would be too costly so there's no way they'd actually do that but I guess when you can steal $92M, anything is possible. They could even fab an esoteric chip and still make a profit.
Why do you think it's too costly? It's well known that there are divisions in DPRK that are focused on generating $ through crypto hacks and compromises.
We're dealing with reasonably sophisticated state actors here in this dark forest; not script kiddies.
Cheap $5 PCB + programmable small FPGA is a very viable route too for hardware implants; but even a microcontroller / ESP32/etc will probably do.
> A technical account published by Tibane Labs described an arrangement involving a microcontroller, cellular communication hardware and connections to the screen’s internal data lines.
Cellular communications hardware seems very sophisticated and expensive compared to a simple microcontroller.
PCBWay will make anything you send them for reasonable pricing. Custom boards etc are not at all hard to manufacture, and for the amount of money you can get, of course you can team up with someone. I think the most people overestimate the cost of bespoke PCB creation.
They did, in fact, appear to mass-manufacture a custom-built flat flex implant with cellular (LTE-M!), eSIM, and everything that hid right inside the Ledger, sniffing the SPI reads to the display to read the recovery phrases it pukes out and send 'em over cellular to the ringleader.
It's an EXTREMELY well built implant. I'm impressed. Multiple revisions, even.
The money's too hot to not build shit like this and slip it into the stream. Even a few thousand in R&D netting a six figure ROI is worth it, getting millions is just the icing.
One would've thought that the display data bus would be encrypted/scrambled in such a device, or at least packaged in a way that makes this kind of attack destructive to the circuit board (chip-on-glass).
Why are these things not potted in epoxy at the factory? Not that it would entirely prevent this attack but it could make it a lot harder to execute and hide.
I'm guessing the best way to go about self custody these days is to have a multi sig wallet, based on multiple hardware wallets from different vendors.
Hardware wallets have a huge target on their back. They are great for convenience, but once you are using multiple for muli-sig you can have more security with less hassle with an airgapped old laptop or a hand-stamped piece of metal you keep in a safe
It would make the tampering more expensive, but not too expensive given the 100 million dollar reward, while also making inspection of the device practically impossible for users.
If you can't get to the insides without breaking it, the only devices verified to likely be safe would be unusable too, so the product would in practice be even more unsafe.
If the user first inspects it and then glue it on their own, that would work, but it wouldn't solve this problem. Evil maid attack is something else and obviously harder at scale.
Ledger has had three data leak incidents: once in 2020, a software supply chain attack in 2023 and another data leak in 2026. This latest one is the fourth.
Even if one were to ignore the latest incident, which arguably isn't their fault, the first three incidents make up a pretty bad security track record.
How a French (EU based) company is still in business after all of this, is an indicator of selective enforcement of EU privacy laws (GDPR, etc).
> the latest incident, which arguably isn't their fault
I'd not release them soo easily from their share of responsibility. Tamper-proof hardware is a thing, electronic funds transfer terminals for example already implement ways to detect or prevent physical intrusion into safety-relevant parts of the device. Would probably have cost a few cents in manufacturing to add countermeasures to physical modification into the Ledgers. The fact that there is not even the slightest attempt at securing the device against this kind of attacks is entirely on the manufacturer.
> How a French (EU based) company is still in business after all of this, is an indicator of selective enforcement of EU privacy laws (GDPR, etc).
Surely you can name a dozen of US companies that have been driven out of business by enforcement of EU privacy laws. But I'd be glad if you'd at least name a single one!
I wonder why they only managed to steal 100M so far. Like with the order of effort needed, why haven't they waited for the really big fish to unlock their ledger?
because the longer they wait, the higher the chance of being discovered before they're able to steal anything. I'm sure there's some game theory about this
Not really. We have physical proof of the compromised Ledger devices; no one has ever presented any specific evidence that Supermicro hardware was similarly compromised.
Reminds me of that time when state actors wanted to spread the Stuxnet worm into an air gapped nucleair facility in Iran, and basically hijacked the whole USB supply chain and put the worm in there.
When enough resources / money is involved, these things are to be expected.
What a f-ing nightmare. It's stuff like this where I start to understand Apple's stance on right to repair. How do you maintain hardware security without strict provenance over every component in your device?
Even if you have perfect provenance over every component you put in, the moment it leaves your factory to be shipped to customers, it can be tampered with.
Even if you would hand it from the factory straight to a customer that comes physically to your factory to pick it up, then you would still require some sort of ID to know that that person is in fact the customer I suppose. Which removes some of the advantages of cryptocurrencies
Can see why hardware wallets seemed a good idea at the time but history has shown this is a terrible way to self custody. Compromised devices aside, the KYC data leaks have put people in danger too.
LOL why would anyone want a hardware wallet when you can just store your Bitcoins on your own encrypted hard disk or USB stick? Bitcoin is merely a file.
These people are being suckered into a false sense of security with hardware cryptowallets. I mean, it would be very tempting to sell a hardware wallet with a backdoor inside of it to steal everyone's cryptocurrency, wouldn't it?
I bought from this very reseller in the last 90 days and I just opened my Stax with a knife to find out it was implanted. It is a very good job too, if I didn't watch the Youtube video, I would think it's part of the original Ledger hardware.
My thinking was it is safer to buy from an authorized reseller than just shipping it. Many people get to access your mail in transit. Granted the devices come in mail regardless for anyone but I thought maybe the authorized thing had some more due diligence or something.
It's always fascinating to me to poke my head into the crypto ecosystem because so many problems people are encountering in it are just... solved in fiat-currency ecosystems.
Nothing like the monopoly on violence to severely discourage bad actors from executing something like this.
You should have a paper backup of your hardware wallet anyway. The point of the wallet is to perform cryptographic calculations you’ll probably rather not do in your head.
This was stealing the seed phrases as they were being displayed so the user could make the paper backup you suggest and in the process have all their current and future coins stolen.
I already commented the other day on this exploit but really it's fascinating.
I don't care about cryptocurrencies but I've always been fascinated by the cryptography behind it. I've also dabbled with hardware wallets for non-cryptocurrencies stuff: like U2F auth.
The idea of a master secret that is behind a secure element which I control and which I can duplicate is amazing to me (as opposed to, say, "your" passkeys which Google/Microsoft/Apple can basically backup and transfer to other devices for you).
But really to me in the cryptocurrencies world people have been sold the lie that a hardware wallet was secure: it's not. It could be tampered with (as happened in this hack, where an additional rogue chip reading the screen and then sending it using an eSIM steals the secret) but it can also contain a bug (like the recent Coldcard exploit where Coldcard hardware wallets fell back on a RNG with only 32 bits of entropy and some dark-hat hacker cracked those and stole Bitcoins) and, most of all, the vendor of the hardware wallet itself can do nasty attacks (like "kleptography").
From the very start everybody in the ecosystem should have pushed of "n-of-n" schemes (say even just 2-of-2), where one secret goes on a hardware wallet from one vendor and the other secret goes on a hardware wallet from another vendor.
For years and years the tune has been: "PCs cannot be trusted, use a hardware wallet" but it mislead people.
PCs indeed cannot be trusted but unsuspecting users should have learned how to use 2-of-2 or 3-of-3 schemes, to become immune from hacks affecting one hardware wallet vendor.
The typical, non-sensical, response to this is the idiotic: "but if you have two secrets, if you lose one of them you lose everything". It's totally idiotic for people basically save a list of 24 words (the "seed", which is the master secret). Well, guess what: instead of saving a list of 24 words, you save a list of 48 words. Exact same thing, just twice longer.
That's my take: the entire "your coins will be safe if you use a hardware wallet" was misguided.
m-of-n provides increased security AND redundancy.
2-of-3 allows loss of one key, 3-of-5 allows loss of two keys, etc
The cost is increased complexity, but the alternative is potentially losing everything due to a single mistake. So far people seem to overweigh the complexity of multisig, and to overestimate their understanding of using a single signing device.
finally, good use for eSIMs /s
But damn, it's hard problem to fix. Put it in epoxy and while tampering is harder (not impossible! also can just replace whole module), you can't verify it
And yet on this exact website people critical of the industry were ridiculed with the exact same rhetoric adopted by the AI industry. It was touted by so many as inevitable, and how we will all be left behind if we don’t join the cult
It really depends the year, but yes, overall I think that’s correct, a majority rejected the crypto bull narrative. While also a significant number of people were pushing it. the same money behind the crypto push has been behind the AI push. And the same peer pressure arguments are used
The cash has been acting as a medium of exchange (something the cryptocurrency industry has given up on, at this point), which is its job, and my wealth is in capital. And capital is what the world runs on. And it's done really well.
Oh-Kay_Labs have said it for years. Not only hackers and thieves go for them, but also kidnappers and robbers. If anyone knows you have one, and things could be much worse. Use paper-wallets, old phones and encrypted USBs instead.
>Use paper-wallets, old phones and encrypted USBs instead.
None of these prevent thieves or anybody from knowing you have one worth stealing. The actual solution is to not use fundamentally broken transparent crypto like BTC that broadcasts to the whole world your exact funds and ties them to your identity on every transaction. With monero your funds could be 0,10 or 10 billion and that is nobody's business.
No matter whether you like or hate or don't care about cryptocurrencies, this is incredible stuff...
Now basically: every single attack that's been described as "theoretical" or "far-fetched" or "only existing in the mind of a paranoid person" did actually happen.
We're talking here about a tiny eSIM implant and a little CPU doing OCR on the fonts appearing on the hardware wallet's screen to read the secrets during set up. So the secure element ain't tampered with.
Not long ago the Coldcard hardware wallet had an issue where it'd fallback to a 32-bit only RNG that could be cracked and so many people got their coins stolen.
Now it's Ledger that sees tampered devices all around the world (in Asia for sure but now there are reports about reseller in the EU selling backdoored/eSIM'ed devices).
For people who own Bitcoin at this point one of the only thing kinda sensible to do is to use multisig schemes, like 2-of-2 or 3-of-3 multisig, where your split the secret over two or three different hardware wallet brands (meaning being able to sign a 2-of-2 wallets requires hardware wallets from two different vendors).
When Ledger hardware wallets came out and people said that seed (the list of words) could be intercepted and relayed by a channel bypassing the computer (here by using an eSIM), people would post explaining that people were nuts if they thought such an attack could be pulled off.
Yet here we are.
And Ledger is responsible for very poor security practices: for example it's impossible to use a Ledger hardware wallet in a fully airgapped/offline way. For you're forced to not only upgrade the firmware but also install the Bitcoin "ledger app" (or whatever that is called) after you entered your seed into the device.
Which is complete and total amateur hour.
In addition to that Ledger offers a service to "backup your seed": what could possibly go wrong with that uh?
I'm betting that we'll soon hear about hardware wallets getting drained due to the seed being exfiltrated through "randomness" in how transactions are built/signed (aka "kleptography").
And it's not just representative about people in the cryptocurrencies ecosystem: people simply don't understand computer security and don't understand the potential attacks nor the length at which attackers are willing to go to steal data/funds/ruin other people's lives.
At this point we've heard about chips' plans being modified before the chips are even built (only to lower the entropy of RNGs) [unrelated to cryptocurrencies btw], a worldwide backdoor attempt in SSH, eSIM sending secrets from hardware wallets with tiny attack surfaces.
You're not anywhere near paranoid enough.
It speaks a lot to the power of financial incentives. As soon as there's money in it, every conceivable attack to get that money has been tried. Which also mimics what happens in market economies: once there is money in it, every conceivable industry springs up, even things that are absurd or harmful. And money appears to be more powerful than things like laws or governments, in that things that are illegal but profitable happen, while things that are legal and unprofitable do not.
In some ways this is kinda encouraging, because it means that even in cases where society collapses and the government disappears, there are really only two fundamental technologies needed to reboot everything: money and contracts.
I kind of get what you're saying, though I'm not sure how much value money would have without a government to back it up. This is true even for cryptocurrencies. If society collapses and I can't convert to some fiat currency, I don't think I'd trade a bitcoin for six slices of bread.
The incentives lead us toward the classic "Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders." scenario.
https://www.insidehook.com/culture/story-tom-toro-new-yorker...
A currency can arise from any fungible, tradable, generally-durable commodity that the bulk of society decides to accept as being worthwhile. In prisons cigarettes often fill that role; in pre-agrarian hunter gatherer groups it's often little baubles like shells. Government isn't necessary for this, but social contract is. You need to have enough faith that your neighbor will accept the currency to accept it yourself.
Cryptocurrencies have the advantage that they can be spent worldwide, instantaneously, with little friction, while most commodities require that you be physically present to exchange them. They're also significantly easier to store and more resistant to garden-variety theft, as long as they're secured by passphrases. But they exist in the uncanny valley of requiring electricity and Internet. It is fairly unlikely that the government collapses and yet you still retain always-on electricity and Internet. What will you use to pay the electric company, and how do you enforce the contract that they keep providing you power?
There's perhaps an interesting role for a digital cryptocurrency that does not require always-on connectivity, eg. something that can be carried over SneakerNet for local transactions, and then automatically syncs up with the global system when the community regains Internet connectivity. In actual conflict zones today, people seem to get intermittent electrical & Internet connectivity, eg. the electricity will come on for an hour a day with rolling blackouts, and then you try to get everything charged in that one hour. And there are enough solar installations out there that several communities are likely to retain significant power even in the event of a societal collapse. But current crypto's consensus mechanisms aren't built for intermittent connectivity: you'd need to build and design something that is eventually consistent, where a weeks-long fork does not result in two competing cryptocurrencies.
> I'm not sure how much value money would have without a government to back it up.
You don't need a government backed paper currency, you need a mint making precious metal coins. History has several examples like the mints at the Potosí silver mines or those by the East India Company that enabled trade without effective governments to back them up by just providing reliable coinage for trade.
As long as there isn't some crazy inflationary force like colonizers arriving with an unlimited supply, we can use something as simple as beads or seashells for currency quite fine. It just means more labor overhead to create that currency in the first place.
doesn't even have to be coins
Somalia operated on paper money valued at the cost of producing it
"Currency without government" can and has existed, though you could argue circularly that whatever can "issue" a currency is a government of a kind.
How something comes to be is distinct from how it is used.
Sir Terry predicted this, in his C. M. O. T. Dibbler character[0].
I was just thinking about click fraud, and how I'll bet that a significant number of clicks on sites are now being driven by simple (they don't need to be too complicated) LLMs.
[0] https://discworld.fandom.com/wiki/Cut-Me-Own-Throat_Dibbler
> It speaks a lot to the power of financial incentives
Also, to the power of modern-day cryptography that rubber-hose and evil maid (backdoors) are the only viable (even if expensive) alternatives.
> the government disappears, there are really only two fundamental technologies needed to reboot everything: money and contracts
Both of which require "governance", but post-collapse, it may be of form that may not benefit the collective.
I don't own any crypto, but if I did, I'd probably choose to use a multisig setup with 2+ signers, including at least one (regularly pentested) software wallet.
Would love to hear people's thoughts on this excerpt from the Epstein files in light of these disclosures:
--------------
From: Vincenzo lozzo
Sent: Monday, July 2, 2018 8:04 AM
To: jeevacation@gmail.com
Subject: Ledger wallet warning
Attachments: image1jpeg; Untitled attachment 00284.txt
In case you hold any coins in it, please don't spread this as they h=ven't released any of the information yet.
As for what is worth, the other wallets seem just as bad
--------------
Links:
https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%2011/EFTA02501... https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%2011/EFTA02507... https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%209/EFTA008603... https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%2011/EFTA02505...
After the Hezbullah pagers incident, the basic assumption has to be that every possible supply chain attack you can think of is realistic.
I don't get hardware wallets that have you enter the key on another device. Or don't show the transaction on the hardware device's screen, with every destination and amount, with a button to confirm on the device. Or trusting a wallet to generate a random seed. Or not using the most entropy possible (e.g. 24-word seed). Anything less is dropping the ball.
This is a big part of my problem with crypto and why I'm bearish on it breaking through to normies. Traditional financial institutions just seem so much safer all in all, not to mention having far better UX.
> this is incredible stuff...
Is it? The theory and even the implementation is literally a gas station credit card skimmer for crypto. I do agree that anyone dismissing attacks on Ledger was foolish, but mostly because Ledger is an obviously low-quality product on even a cursory inspection, not because we need to become even more paranoid conspiracy theorists.
The idea reminds me somehow of bank card ATM skimmers from old times like this one (2009): https://www.consumerreports.org/consumerist/heres-what-a-car...
Here I am using an iPhone app like I have been for a decade, feeling safer than ever. I'm really glad I didn't jump on the hardware wallet trend.
Even iPhone apps:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1x46gnh/a_fake_cry...
Not sure if your comment invalidates the context: your iPhone app (or hardware or iOS, etc) could have a bug that was not discovered yet. It's all about attack vectors, and opponent motivation and resources.
Multiple crypto-experts said that the safest crypto wallet is a recent iPhone in airplane mode which is only used for this purpose. Because it's much harder to implant that your average hardware crypto wallet.
On the other hand, the attack surface of an iPhone is huge compared to a dedicated hardware wallet, and it's hard to keep it in airplane mode and actually transact your coins.
How about if you build your own airgapped hw wallet? There should be plenty folks here who would be capable of doing so. (Doesn't even have to be the most hardened and audited implementation ever since you won't release this to anybody.) This makes you vulnerable to purely very targetted attacks.
As long as the cost of sucha single-target attack isn't substantially below its potential upside, you should be safe.
Otoh, it's only meaningful if you have more than just toy assets in there.
There should be a range between those two though that would contain lots of folks comfortably.
Why is it harder to implant?
The hardware is much more sophisticated, miniaturized, and high-speed, and the supply chain is much more generic; a Ledger is a really primitive piece of hardware with a simple display interface and a ton of empty space inside it. An iPhone has no wasted space and extremely high-speed onboard buses that would be hard to sniff. Additionally, with Ledger, you know that every customer is going to be using the device to access crypto, so it's an easy target nearer the head of the supply chain. With an iPhone, you have no idea what end-user to target the implant against.
You can walk in to an official Apple store and buy an iphone direct almost anywhere in the world. Crypto thieves would have to have compromised the entirety of Apple's supply chain and found space inside the iphone to fit a whole spy chip (of which there is basically none).
I'm going to guess it's a number's game, you might be able to do it with an iPhone but it's not guaranteed to go to a crypto user, whereas the other one is a bespoke system for the purpose.
I presume because iPhones have a secure TPM and nobody is targeting them for crypto supply chain attacks.
"crypto-experts"
> No matter whether you like or hate or don't care about cryptocurrencies, this is incredible stuff...
> Now basically: every single attack that's been described as "theoretical" or "far-fetched" or "only existing in the mind of a paranoid person" did actually happen.
Huh? Nothing here is theoretical or far-fetched. Hardware attacks of this sort have been documented for decades and basically part-and-parcel for most intelligence agencies, from the US govt installing backdoors in Cisco hardware to the exploding pagers for Hamas. This is not even the first hardware wallet attack documented on the internet (although it might be the largest-scale one).
It's just that hardware attacks are complicated, expensive, and risky, so they're usually done in a targeted manner. The only news here is that the crypto community painted a gigantic target on their backs by inventing a currency that can be taken from them with zero recourse, broadcasting it to the world that they own a lot of it, and then buying cheap hardware from overseas retailers to "protect" their assets. So all of sudden, it was profitable and relatively low-risk to cast a wider net.
It's fascinating in the sense that we're discovering from first principles why the financial system works the way it does. The damage caused by cryptocurrencies has been really pretty staggering, for little real benefit.
It is far-fetched because it is an attack by thieves on consumers, not a state intelligence agency and intelligence targets. It's far-fetched for me to fly an B-2 bomber, but it's been commonplace for US government for decades.
I remember chatting with about AI a few months ago about the issue of foreign RAM sticks being able to cooperate with websites to serve different files/instructions, undetectably. Scary stuff.
Are you sure whatever the LLM said was actually credible though?
> Now basically: every single attack that's been described as "theoretical" or "far-fetched" or "only existing in the mind of a paranoid person" did actually happen.
It's predictable: The ROI of attacking cryptocurrencies in this manner is high enough to make expensive attacks worthwhile. It doesn't make other expensive attacks on typical end-users worthwhile, and they remain far-fetched.
> So the secure element ain't tampered with.
Back in the day, RSA SecurID hardware tokens were completely physically sealed, with no room for a backdoor. Tampering with them in any ways destroys them or makes it physically obvious. That's a physically secure design. This Ledger thing looks more like a consumer toy.
Not to contradict your point, but in 2011 RSA's SecurID backend servers were hacked. TOTPs require shared secrets, and their server had all the secrets to the SecurID keyfobs they managed. Security is hard.
> or "only existing in the mind of a paranoid person" did actually happen.
This reminds me of the 2020 case where a union organizer thought there was a spy camera inside a utility pole outside his house. It was in a conspiracy subreddit, so it seemed like the deranged ramblings of a ravingly-paranoid stranger. But they found the addresses of the IP cams and had plenty of evidence to corroborate it.
Now, Flock cameras are just normal.
I think the 2020s will be defined by this trend. "Things which only existed in the minds of a paranoid person" becoming normal parts of daily life.
Most large cities in the world have had thousands of public CCTV cameras for decades. Traffic enforcement cameras have been super normal for even longer.
[delayed]
This is why I sold my bitcoin early - all those years of reading Phrack. Sure, it was $300 at the time and I could have made more, but I had no idea how to securely _store_ it. Still don't.
You are king sensible. Well done. Just $90,000 per BTC worse off ha ha.
I had 3 whole bitcoin. Lol.
Not mentioned in article: MediaMarkt, the German equivalent of Best Buy, was selling these compromised devices on store shelves in every city in Germany.
Selling Ledger wallets or compromised Ledger wallets? My understanding was a reputable reseller (Cryptobilis) was bought and then the wallets were modified via the reseller chain. This isn’t on Ledger it’s a (literal) supply chain attack. Unless MediaMarkt was buying via the reseller?
according to this guy, compromised (https://x.com/0xJohannes_/status/2109240472933671125). Interestingly, Mediamarkt removed the device from their shop quickly after (https://www.mediamarkt.de/de/product/_ledger-sas-nano-s-plus... now 404).
They would remove them regardless of known compromise, because they have no way to verify it in-house and it’s the simplest PR and legal strategy.
> This isn’t on Ledger it’s a (literal) supply chain attack.
Supply chain attack?
"Can't do shit, not my problem."
If it was that easy to shed responsibility.
TBF that characterization was mine. It’s not been Ledger’s response AFAIK.
I don't know coin stuff, but if top comment's...
"We're talking here about a tiny eSIM implant and a little CPU doing OCR on the fonts appearing on the hardware wallet's screen to read the secrets during set up. So the secure element ain't tampered with."
...is accurate...it's one of the rare times I'd agree there's nothing they can do. And I was all prepared to storm in here saying "convenient excuse!"
>there's nothing they can do
The device should have bricked itself after someone opened it up to put hidden stuff inside. Also showing the key phrase to the user instead of keeping it secret to the secure element is a questionable decision.
people do need the option to repair devices, especially when they contain valuable information, so I don't see an automatic bricking to be a reasonable solution
I would love to know if I can use one of this to get unlimited data worldwide.
Jokes aside, keystone wallets are air gapped. And not air gapped but awesome the lesser known but imo best of all, gridplus lattice1.
Heck, even a trezor, despite their mail provider being hacked, is better.
I, however, dont endorse the iPhone idea.
Just don’t buy ledger, terrible company. Many of my friends are getting endless spam because of them. The key backup is a disaster after they promised it was not possible to retrieve it. Their software stack is closed source.
This is imo the last nail in the coffin for them. They should refund all the money lost, and issue a worldwide recall.
Lots to hate about them.
There's a medium. Something ironically close to apple's 'non fully approved and supply chained repair' thing (especially when we consider the case of a screen that could be OCRing data and tossing it out later).
'You have unexpected components. You may want to have your device inspected or risking compromise of x/y/z. Should we continue or lock it down'?
If you can't back up your keys, then what?
I'd rather have to buy another wallet than have to worry that someone is able to drain it.
I wonder what the liabilities are for that
Not much unless you can show that they knew about it. Otherwise, they are just as much a victim.
They are liable. In Germany the seller of a product is responsible not the producer.
I'd assume a company like that would have insurance for this. They'd be able to reimburse the customer knowing they'd get paid back from an insurance claim. That is, if they are actually insured for these kinds of losses.
A few years ago, the Canon camera battery supply chain was intermingled with knock offs. The seller I bought from was exchanging for legit batteries or reimbursement when a customer made a claim.
Why doesn't it surprise me that the shittiest company Media Markt is somehow involved in this. These guys are about to close shop anyway, rest in piss Mediamarkt.
The technique is so coool. I mean taping the screen output on the way to the display to get around having to hack the secure element. :)
Great example of a digital 'analog hole'; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_hole
I had a similar idea to bypass DRM for a while. Some kind of board that goes between the display panel driver and whatever sends it the signal, and outputs something you can capture, e.g. DVI or unencrypted HDMI. Not sure how practical it is.
In the past (circa a few years ago) the connection between the main board for a display and the glass driver board would be a ribbon cable, LVDS signalling. Very straightforward and typically not soldered. There'd be a ribbon cable connector. So yeah, you could just put a board between easily. And there are LVDS to H264/H265 chips already.
But as the other comment points out, older HDCP is broken wide open so ... easier to just use that. Plenty HDCP strippers on the market.
HDMI 1.4 has been leaked and there are devices which will force communication to this protocol level.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/hdcp-bypass/s?k=hdcp+bypass
These guys had the audacity to slap a label on their box: "See how there's no security sticker? That's because our hardware is soooo secure"
Everyone at ledger has made absolute fools out of themselves.
This whole operation smells Israeli from the beginning to the end. First are these USB ledgers with modified hardware (guess who likes to do that on pagers and similar), then this happens in Germany, the country that never says "no" to the same specific group of people and finally they try exfiltrate the stolen funds with the favorite "private" coin of the same group of people, which in end is (again) proven to NOT be private at all.https://x.com/YFarmX/status/2108918564015006200
HN will never permit to look into the origin of this criminal action and normies will not even put that possibility on the table because they've been programmed against it. Let's play a game, this is a serious criminal act. I bet this will be quickly forgoten in about 3 weeks without anyone in Germany pointing fingers to the guilty party.
Hardware wallets are not a solution to self-custody.
If one would make a list of things that can go wrong, starting from the supply chain that delivers parts to the manufacturer, malicious employees at the manufacturer, mistakes the manufacturer can make, attacks on the delivery chain from the manufacturer to the user, to mistakes the user can make creating, using and storing their keys - the list would contain hundreds of points.
Do passkeys next.
Passkeys don’t gate immutable financial transactions. (Pretty much everything you do in a bank’s website is reversible during the day to a few days out.)
> Hardware wallets are not a solution to self-custody.
Look back as recently as last year and hardware wallets were held up as the recommended way to do self-custody all over.
Whenever I brought up the issue of losing coins due to hacks or bugs, I was told that hardware wallets had solved this problem.
There have been more hacks, bugs, and coins lost from software or custodial wallets than ever have and likely ever will be lost from hardware wallets.
> Hardware wallets are not a solution to self-custody.
Nothing in this world tends to be "the solution", everything has tradeoffs.
Say you want to do self-custody, what is then the best option? "Don't do self-custody" obviously isn't the solution, as the core use case here is self-custody, so what in your opinion is a better way, than hardware wallets?
If there is nothing better today than hardware wallets, then for now, they are "one of the better solutions" for how to do self-custody, even with the current tradeoffs. But again, I'm eager to hear what the alternatives are.
There is no solution yet.
From a bird's-eye perspective, 3 things are needed: Create a key, derive an address from the key, store the key.
Creating a key safely is possible with dice. You would probably create a seed phrase instead of a key directly, but for this discussion it is the same.
Deriving an address from the key is hard and I have not yet seen a good protocol on how to do it. I have read through a bunch of descriptions of how people do it and they are all weak and brittle. The most popular seems to be "I order a hardware wallet and follow the instructions that come with it". But even people who put a lot of thought into it come up with weak and brittle approaches. I would think there is a way to do it safely. But I have never seen a description of one yet. It might involve multiple computers, multiple software implementations and a hell of a lot of work to create a multisig that is not prone to a single attack vector.
Storing the key is probably the hardest. The most popular way seems to be to store it in a drawer or a safe. So now those coins are just as safe as a piece of gold would be. Or they use a multisig and store the keys in multiple locations. Quite painful. As you have the ongoing problem of keeping those locations accessible and safe at the same time.
How is multisig "quite painful" in your opinion?
Say you've done everything right and used 3 coldcards spread across 3 geographic locations using 2of3 multisig.
You're feeling pretty proud of yourself, your coins are super safe.
Then it turns out the RNG in the coldcard mk2 was badly/maliciously implemented and is completely insecure. You need to move your coins right now.
You can probably see the issue
You'd probably want to use diversity for this - do 2of3 multisig with a Coldcard, a Ledger, and a Trezor.
> There is no solution yet.
Again, "best solution we have available" for self-custody is hardware wallets, so we're back to square one.
Imagine if I tried to discuss and argue about things like this on a TypeScript submission? "No, this won't actually solve the problems of TS" I say, "What is the solution then?" someone asks me and I reply "There is no real solutions to those problems, just use Clojure, problems avoided!", completely missing the point.
Then can you give an example of what you would consider a solution, whether hypothetical or real?
Banks and payment providers (Visa Mastercard AMX) provide services beyond simply a store of wealth and a mechanism to transfer it.
Actually 2FA, hardware biometrics, behaviour based fraud prevention and personal confirmation of suspicious transactions. If you’re using credit they can refund fraudulent transactions, and there is the chargeback mechanism. This is probably banking system dependent, but in AUS there is a refund mechanism for mistaken/fraudulent traditional bank transactions.
BTC has effectively none of the safety net, and humans are fallible. We need the safety net. It’s the hugest barrier to adoption. Exchanges do a far better job of managing the risks than trusting your wealth to a hardware wallet.
In financial systems with a basis in law, no transaction is ever final. It doesn't matter what the protocol says or what the technology is capable of, if the judge says that the transaction must be reversed, you get it reversed, even if that means delivering cash in briefcases or something like that.
In systems with a basis in technology, final means final. If the North Koreans take your money, your money is taken.
This piece from Patrick mcKenzie explains this well https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/the-900m-wire...
> In systems with a basis in technology, final means final. If the North Koreans take your money, your money is taken.
This seems obviously not true. If someone in New York steals your money then courts in New York can order them to give it back even if it's Bitcoin. If they don't comply then they get held in contempt until they do or the police seize their computer with the keys on it etc.
If the person who stole it is in North Korea then the courts with jurisdiction would be the ones in North Korea, which may not be to your advantage, but how is it any different from what happens after the money was transferred to a bank in North Korea? Or, for that matter, what happens if someone in North Korea has the stolen money deposited into a US account and then spends it before you get around to reversing the transaction?
The problem isn't what kind of technology you use, it's that someone can transfer stolen assets into a jurisdiction that won't help you get them back. Regardless of what payment system you use, they can get the same effect by using the stolen money to buy gold bullion or similar and have it shipped to them in their jurisdiction, and once it crosses the border they're not giving it back.
> If the North Koreans take your money, your money is taken
If you wire your money to North Korea, forget about it for a week, and then ask a court to intervene you aren’t getting your funds back.
Are there any American banks that will let you wire money to North Korea?
> if the judge says that the transaction must be reversed, you get it reversed, even if that means delivering cash in briefcases or something like that
So if I pay cash for something, I can get it back if a judge orders the counterparty to do so.
Why is cryptocurrency not the same? Can I not go to a court and get an order, exactly the same?
Of course I may not know the counterparty's identity or they may be in a hostile jurisdiction, but how is that different to cash that has escaped my jurisdiction?
I have worked for and/or audited the majority of exchanges, that mostly white-label a much smaller number of players.
I have yet to see a single one, not one, that had a system of custody that did not allow any one of hundreds of people, most not even employees, to walk away with all of the funds.
There are no standards for security that apply to crypto custodians and the mostly fail to do the bare minimums.
If you use even a top ten custodian, operate under the assumption that the funds are in multi billion dollar plaintext wallets sitting on AWS servers the whole team has ssh access to from the same laptops they "npm install" random shit to all day.
Honestly if you do not feel confident custodying crypto yourself, you should probably not own any.
And if you do feel confident, you probably shouldn't own crypto either.
Even if you are not hacked, or otherwise lose access to the funds, they are not unlikely to become worthless simply due to the system with the stable coins collapsing.
The liquidity can easily disappear, much more so than with Fiat currency or other assets linked to real economies.
You cannot protect yourself from being scammed in that way, even if you do hold on to your keys.
The safety net makes you less secure against the U.S. government, but more secure against everyone else. That's the right choice for almost all users, but I still think it's at least kind of good that people have a choice.
You sure about that last sentence?
https://de.fi/rekt-database
I’m not saying they are perfect, but on aggregate they are better than hardware wallets. Legally they will be responsible if your money is lost. They are about as close as you can get to the type of legal assurances provided by a bank.
Anacdote, I have a friend who is a locksmith. I needed his services one day, gave him a call, and it turned out his day job had evolved since I last talked to him 5 years ago.
Basically, he was now just a safe cracker. He is a a locksmith, but 100% of his full time hours are cracking safes. He didn’t even carry around the stuff in his van to repin a lock. He gave me mates rates but the shop had to do it.
This man was attending multiple callouts, per day, to crack into a safe. Because of, you guessed it, human fallibility.
In a city with with millions of people, basically a hundreds of people needed a single locksmiths service because they had locked themselves out of there own “personal store of wealth”.
I’ve heard zero such examples through traditional banking, with the exception of stolen cards.
Use a device that’s mass produced enough it can’t be targeted e.g a MacBook, then keep it airgapped and don’t do normal computing on it.
Hardware wallets are air-gapped. The issue here was a distributor got acquired and then snuck a chip in that could read the spi link between the microcontroller and the screen. The chip had its own cellular modem and could send the passphrase that was shown on the screen to the attackers.
If you sell a device specifically for storing large amounts of liquid assets, that puts a huge target on that device. You are basically asking for supply chain attacks
An ordinary MacBook does not have that issue. If you are a high-value target, you can further decrease your risk profile by buying it from a random physical store, further preventing targeted attacks.
The post you're replying to is arguing that it wouldn't be feasible to do that with a MacBook (at least if you buy it off the shelf at Best Buy).
>Hardware wallets are air-gapped.
The ones with hidden eSIMs aren't!
Boy that was a slog, to dig deep enough through the slop to find the technical details…
In retrospect @gigachad’s summary is worth as much as both articles combined, but for the Clauded technical source (with pictures!) that Ledger’s Claude-release refers to: https://www.tibane.net/research/ledger-nano-x-implant
Nobody said hardware wallets aren't air-gapped. They said take something normal and usual enough not to be an attractive target for bespoke crypto stealers, and then airgap that to make your wallet.
airgapped pre crypto devices are extra safe: break out the ti82! don’t buy a ti82 for this purpose, it has to be one you had in your closet. If a blog post describes how to code it in TiBasic then affiliate links a calculator in ebay, well…
Qubes OS can be more secure than airgapping in some cases: https://doc.qubes-os.org/en/latest/introduction/faq.html#how...
There is none yet.
If there was one, someone would write down the steps necessary and put them on the internet. But I have never seen a sound description of how to self-custody Bitcoin in a safe way.
The hardest part seems to not even be the one that currently creates all those problems - the hardware and software used. The hardest part is storing the key (for example a seed phrase). If anyone says they know a way to safely store Bitcoin, my first question is: How do you store the key?
There are a few out there, but this is probably the best: https://github.com/bowlarbear/yeti-2.0
remember it? Write it down somewhere hidden if you have to.
Where do you store your bank password? Couldn't the same be used for a seed phrase?
The sensitivity of my bank password is much lower than a seed phrase because most bank transactions can be reversed as long as I notice them in time and prove my identity to my bank.
With bitcoin nothing is reversible so every step of the process is a huge security risk where you can fall off a cliff and experience financial permadeath of "your" crypto, assuming a sufficiently motivated attacker.
get a brand new, cheap laptop or machine (even a raspberry pi works) that you randomly pickup at the store (no delivery order). Install debian 13, install electrum, airgap the device, reboot and generate 1-of-2 your wallet keys.
The wipe the device, use any non-debian other linux (or BSD) to generated the 2-of-2 wallet key.
Why would you ever connect it to the internet? Air gap forever. Physically rip out the radio, only load software by CD (ideally not through a USB interface).
Using the banking system instead of crypto.
MPC or multi-sig is a pretty good solution, you can require a 2/3 sign off from different custody solutions (ie. a hardware, desktop, and mobile wallet)
The existing financial system which provides protection to consumers. Crypto doesn’t solve the problem the general public assumes it does and hype has inflated its value dramatically.
Yes, but this threat analysis also holds for laptops and phones.
What do you use to access your bank account online? I use my laptop, or my phone.
If your money is stolen from a bank account via fraud you have recourse to get it back, and it’s pretty straightforward to do in most cases.
Very often this is not the case. Debit / credit cards payments are quite reversible, but once a person send $100,000 or even $10,000 to a scammer it can be quite hard to recover.
Even banks find it hard to recover: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangladesh_Bank_robbery
Caused by an account take over? This is letter of the law stuff and something bank (and other financial firms) employees receive specific training on. The customers loss is capped and their bank is on the hook.
For inter-bank transactions involving a scam that causes the customer to “voluntarily” send money it depends on the rail. But US ACH rules cover reversals due to fraud and have pretty substantial rules about it.
All the countries have rules about it. Except if your credentials been compromised it can take weeks before you find out that money gone from your account.
Usually how it goes is if someone hacks your account or steals credit card info. You get refunded. If a scammer convinces you to willingly send the money, you’re out of luck.
The truth is that banks often have pretty bad security and customer service, but the risk of getting caught after stealing crypto is virtually zero when compared to scamming someone’s bank account balance.
Because the scammers are instructing victims to use methods that are difficult or impossible to reverse, such as gift cards or cryptocurrency.
Don't buy gift cards and send them to random people would be a good rule to live by.
Yeah, "everyone" knows that. Except the world har an incredible amount of people who fall for these kinds of scams. And there are less obvious scams around.
I almost fell for a strange scam a while ago. A Steam user by the same name as one of my existing steam friends added me. I assumed it was his second account and accepted. A few days later, he messages me, asking me to participate in a DOTA2 tournament. I had previously played DOTA2 with this person, he spoke to me in our shared native language which is not English and everything seemed in order. I said I haven't played DOTA2 in years so I'm beyond rusty, he said I don't have to play, they just need me to register so they have a full team for the signups and then they'll find someone else to play before the tournament starts. Sent me a link to a website requiring a signup and I can't remember what it was now but there was something about the signup that irked me. Maybe it was just creating a account, maybe it required a credit card or something I can't remember but I ended up looking at my steam friends list and noticed both the accounts were online. So I sent a message to the other account asking if this is them, he said no and then I noticed the same scammer had added another mutual friend so I messaged them too warning them about it.
That's the closest I've been to getting scammed that I can recall. I'm not sure what the scammer would gain from my signing up but I'm sure they had some kind of profit angle.
its a fake steam login! theyll phish you for your login and login into your account, messaging your friends...
And yet people still do it.
But freedom.
Seriously, that's why we have banks, still.
Good luck trying send money abroad or dealing with a sudden unexplained account shutdown.
I have had no problem sending or receiving money abroad, thank you.
yet
We are not all living in America, yet.
Well as far as I know banks in Europe (UK included) already ask you a lot of questions when you withdraw your money(I.e cash) or even when you wire various amounts( unless you have a good bank manager). My bank manager in Europe just told me straight that I don’t need to explain him anything but he has to call me anyway because of the bank policy(I.e to tick the boxes).
Next is a hold on your suspicious transaction, request additional documents for your own money, basically a lot of AML and KYC before you can use what’s yours.
I understand the reason why they do this but it feels to me you are no longer in control of your money/property and somehow they fail to catch people loading billions from shady sources so I would rather not keep my money in a bank (at least not a retail bank) if I had a sensible option.
Most people don’t care about this until they get trapped just like most people are /were OK with Paypal and other junk services.
That's not really relevant; the U.S. government has enough leverage over the global (fiat) financial system that they can cause any account in any First World country to be shut down.
The actual reason to discount this is that account shutdowns are flashy rare events that reliably summon HN outrage, and so the kind of person who posts here overweights how likely they are, at least for people not on the margins of society. (If that weren't the case, the system wouldn't work and normal people wouldn't use it.)
About one in five international money transfers fail for me. EU to EU countries. SEPA isn’t bulletproof. Outside office hours I have an even higher failure rate.
Ironically the failure rate when I use the American Visa or MasterCard is maybe 5%.
The link you want:
https://grandideastudio.com/portfolio/security/ledger-hardwa...
They should have posted the weight with and without the device in it.
Also: never leave empty space in a hardware key, pot the whole thing in epoxy.
No, this is May version. If you look at the twitter thread, the October version is different and looks much more "stock"
(sadly I have not found nice website with newer version photos yet)
I heard they reduced the battery size to make space for their chip.
Yes, hence the potting. You'd have to figure out a way to open the device without breaking it.
When there are millions of dollars to be stolen, someone can figure out how to remove the potting.
If need be, just grind and cut till you are back to the one silicon wafer that contains crypto keys, then rebuild the whole lot from scratch, add your evil parts, then re-pot it.
That would work on an already configured wallet that you stole but the skill level required is orders of magnitude higher than what's on display here. I know all of the theory on that one but I would probably not be able to pull that off.
The best I've done is to modify a potted chip by very careful thermal imaging to figure out where the part was that blocked the feature I wanted to unlock (market segmentation) and then drill through the case to a depth just higher than the chip. You'd have definitely been able to spot the difference. This was at the millimeter level. Recently there was a post about a group doing this at the chip level, which I thought was extremely impressive, and again, even with the recipe out there duplicating it would still be very hard.
Market segmentation?! What device is high quality enough to be potted but still has the same hardware modified by jumpers across models?
Xbox Kamikaze hack (How a drill defeated the Xbox 360’s console security)
https://www.xda-developers.com/how-drill-defeated-the-xbox-3...
Hah! Very similar, they even made a jig like I did.
> The best I've done is to modify a potted chip by very careful thermal imaging to figure out where the part was that blocked the feature I wanted to unlock (market segmentation) and then drill through the case to a depth just higher than the chip.
Sounds like a good approach when you only have a single (or just a few) of the devices so you need to be careful.
With hardware wallets (aka substantial incentive), then the attackers could order a bunch of them for sacrificial zero-ing in the exact places to drill with a CNC/microscope/etc.
> Sounds like a good approach when you only have a single (or just a few) of the devices so you need to be careful.
Yes, initially I had just the one. But once I had it figured out there were lots of other people that wanted their device 'improved' so that jig got used plenty of times. Even so working on other people's hardware always felt very scary, especially poking around with a drill in a sensitive piece of hardware. Even so, they all worked, it was a neat little trick.
This story is a case of someone tampering with devices in the supply chain, before the user first receives them.
What you’re describing is a different thing. It’s an “evil maid” attack, when you tamper with a wallet that is already set up by the user. Also, it would be ultra difficult and expensive.
What you’re saying is possible. But:
It would probably be cheaper to build a total fake Ledger Wallet, then just replace the new real wallet and deliver a fake with a weak entropy generator. Any case, that’s not what has happened this time.
The legit wallets have an online way to verify they are genuine by cryptographic means. A totally new fake couldn't do that.
Thanks. I believe you’re right a totally fake copy couldn’t verify. So that idea was wrong.
(The MITM supply chain attack which has happened succeeds because it preserves the original secure hardware but intercepts the secret data at the display interface. But a low-effort mimic of the entire device like I suggested? That wouldn’t work).
Ledger provides a 'Genuine Check' mechanism to determine the authenticity of the device; however, it explicitly warns that it cannot detect added implants when the device's original Secure Element remains intact.
And as this workaround leaves the original Secure Element intact, good luck detecting the supply chain attack.
I think that’s where the epoxy from earlier in this comment chain is supposed to come in.
millions out of thousands of wallets. Epoxy potting raises the lottery ticket and odds of getting caught by a great deal.
Well, still a safer reason for clandestinely reducing the size of a battery in a mobile device many people carry around close to their body.
This one too (pardon the AI slop): https://www.tibane.net/research/ledger-nano-x-implant
Ah good one, more useful info in that one. That kapton circuit might be traceable to whoever ordered it.
And the Vodafone NL SIM could also offer some leads
Vodafone NL data only SIMs are very common for IoT connectivity when devices need to roam in Europe, such as in connected cars.
I'd assume it's not a coincidence and fraudsters made sure there's no easy way to trace anything back from the SIMs.
Yes, this is quite true. Virtual providers are quite easy to set up that way but the amount of KYC for this kind of service is substantial. Even so, these SIMs/eSIMs have turned up in all kinds of bad places such as SIM farms.
I have some friends there, I will ping them.
This is May version. If you look at the twitter thread, the October version is different and looks much more "stock"
These recent teardowns of compromised Ledger wallets are frightening. Because the infiltration of hardware looks very pro. Mass production and standardized parts added.
Even weight difference might not be obvious. He compared weights for one Ledger product but the small variations in weight among genuine devices made comparisons not clear.
Possibly only X-ray would uncover the fake without cracking the case?
https://youtube.com/@MagicalTux
(Warning - MagicalTux is Tibanne or Mark Karpeles. He has a “complicated” legal history, but this looks legit)
Is that safe for devices containing a lithium battery?
Good question: the battery here doesn't look like it had any room for expansion so it wouldn't be worse per se. But normally you want a little bit of room around a battery, I guess a thin foam liner would allow for that and would still allow you to pot the whole thing.
Worst case, a bloating battery cracking open a plastic enclosure or being able to vent gas through the gaps in one would be preferable too, right?
Absolutely and it is why I hate these little pouch cells in wearables. Phones, headphones, in-ear pods, sports gear, toys (which kids take to bed), they're absolutely everywhere and if you look at the way they are usually mounted it is a small miracle there aren't more issues. Powerbanks in particular are a pretty serious hazard.
They could x-ray it, carve out epoxy with nothing inside, put the logger, apply epoxy.
Not that easy. The potting epoxies made for this purpose are nothing like your regular epoxies. They're pricey and when you try to break them you are very likely to tear the parts right off the board. This is the brand I have used in the past:
https://www.masterbond.com/techtips/tamper-resistant-potting...
The devices we made were put in places where there was a significant risk of tampering and to the best of my knowledge nobody ever managed to break the epoxy bond to the point that the circuit was still functional. But as I wrote above: not cheap.
Take off the case, put your own entire module in, put the case back in. Epoxy doesn't solve much.
...frankly, selling one as DIY kit have highest chance for tamper resistance. Tho pretty untenable with small SMD components sadly
Exhibit #9387434 for reasons to stay out of crypto.
Man, I wish there were some pictures. I didn’t even know that there are LTE modems that small.
There are pictures online. And for an unexplainable reason it is the person behind the biggest Bitcoin exchange SNAFU of all times (where hackers stole something like 800 000 Bitcoins), Mark Karpeles of "Mt. Gox" (who did jail time btw), who was the first to post them:
Apparently the hacker did remove the battery and replace it with a smaller one, leaving enough room for the tiny eSIM/LTE modem / OCR chip that did recognition of the secret on screen.
https://www.tibane.net/research/ledger-nano-x-implant
They're here. It's wild.
I want to read that but my slop detector went off. Instant disinterest.
Give me a shitty html4 page with the text ffs.
It's definitely AI-written, annoying as fuck god damn it, but the photos are good and the descriptions of the boards, are at least at cursory glance, pretty accurate.
tl;dr Implant is just a little cell phone that does OCR of the hardware wallet's screen during setup to steal the recovery phrases. The implant's design has improved notably three different times before landing on a pretty darn sleek spot-welded overlay that is laminated flat onto the host.
What incredible engineering
It's a great hack. I wonder why they didn't just spin a new board and transplant the secure-enclave chip to it.
I guess the sweatshop workers would then need to be trained in reballing BGAs if they did that.
Funny enough, EEVBlog posted a teardown video of one of those things today. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JnHdr30v4g
I wonder the lengths smartphone vendors are going to prevent this kind of attack. I cannot imagine it is easy to completely validate hardware in such an elaborate supply chain. I shudder to think about the attack surface in something like a modern car.
The attack is profitable because it's targeted. Every one of those devices contains crypto. Which is not the case for mobile phones.
It seems unlikely that smartphones would be targeted for such an attack because almost nobody stores large amounts of crypto on their smartphone. Those that do will likely get hacked more traditionally.
TBH, this just sounds to me like the crypto industry is discovering, yet again, why the banking and credit card industry have all this red tape and supply chain security.
Like sure, they're not fully immune... But at least I can call my bank and show them that I didn't suddenly fly from New Mexico to Florida to buy $200 in gift cards from a gas station in the middle of nowhere.
Crypto MUST deal with fraud and hacking if they want to become reliable. At that point, they'll just become another bank with a casino attached.
I can guarantee that if this was open-source, someone or some system would’ve picked it up. I’m still amazed that one guy picked up the XZ Utils backdoor because it slowed down after an update.
My gut reaction is that a hardware implant would be too costly so there's no way they'd actually do that but I guess when you can steal $92M, anything is possible. They could even fab an esoteric chip and still make a profit.
Why do you think it's too costly? It's well known that there are divisions in DPRK that are focused on generating $ through crypto hacks and compromises.
We're dealing with reasonably sophisticated state actors here in this dark forest; not script kiddies.
Cheap $5 PCB + programmable small FPGA is a very viable route too for hardware implants; but even a microcontroller / ESP32/etc will probably do.
> A technical account published by Tibane Labs described an arrangement involving a microcontroller, cellular communication hardware and connections to the screen’s internal data lines.
Cellular communications hardware seems very sophisticated and expensive compared to a simple microcontroller.
It's not though, it's a pretty standard component.
Other commentator covered it a bit but BOM cost is a negligible percentage
Dangerous things sells implantable chips.
Eg. https://dangerousthings.com/products/apex-flex?Antenna=Narro...
PCBWay will make anything you send them for reasonable pricing. Custom boards etc are not at all hard to manufacture, and for the amount of money you can get, of course you can team up with someone. I think the most people overestimate the cost of bespoke PCB creation.
If you slide through and ignore the writing, the linked implant teardown is wild - https://www.tibane.net/research/ledger-nano-x-implant
They did, in fact, appear to mass-manufacture a custom-built flat flex implant with cellular (LTE-M!), eSIM, and everything that hid right inside the Ledger, sniffing the SPI reads to the display to read the recovery phrases it pukes out and send 'em over cellular to the ringleader.
It's an EXTREMELY well built implant. I'm impressed. Multiple revisions, even.
The money's too hot to not build shit like this and slip it into the stream. Even a few thousand in R&D netting a six figure ROI is worth it, getting millions is just the icing.
One would've thought that the display data bus would be encrypted/scrambled in such a device, or at least packaged in a way that makes this kind of attack destructive to the circuit board (chip-on-glass).
Amateur hour all around.
Why are these things not potted in epoxy at the factory? Not that it would entirely prevent this attack but it could make it a lot harder to execute and hide.
I'm guessing the best way to go about self custody these days is to have a multi sig wallet, based on multiple hardware wallets from different vendors.
I wouldn't trust any of the hardware wallet vendors. Pretty much all of them have had customer data leaks, resulting in wrench attacks.
You're better off just having a dedicated laptop for crypto transactions.
Hardware wallets have a huge target on their back. They are great for convenience, but once you are using multiple for muli-sig you can have more security with less hassle with an airgapped old laptop or a hand-stamped piece of metal you keep in a safe
Don't forget to bury it under a cement birdbath in your back yard!
What always surprised me is there aren't many implementations of multisig for EVM based chains.
Actually the only one I know is the Gnosis Safe. Talk about creating a huge risk if it would have a problem.
I wonder if a epoxy/resin potting would solve this sort of attack. Or active tamper response that fries the board if someone tampers with the case.
It would make the tampering more expensive, but not too expensive given the 100 million dollar reward, while also making inspection of the device practically impossible for users.
If you can't get to the insides without breaking it, the only devices verified to likely be safe would be unusable too, so the product would in practice be even more unsafe.
If the user first inspects it and then glue it on their own, that would work, but it wouldn't solve this problem. Evil maid attack is something else and obviously harder at scale.
Not your factory, distributor, warehouses, fulfillment centers and entire supply chain, not your coins.
Ledger has had three data leak incidents: once in 2020, a software supply chain attack in 2023 and another data leak in 2026. This latest one is the fourth.
Even if one were to ignore the latest incident, which arguably isn't their fault, the first three incidents make up a pretty bad security track record.
How a French (EU based) company is still in business after all of this, is an indicator of selective enforcement of EU privacy laws (GDPR, etc).
> the latest incident, which arguably isn't their fault
I'd not release them soo easily from their share of responsibility. Tamper-proof hardware is a thing, electronic funds transfer terminals for example already implement ways to detect or prevent physical intrusion into safety-relevant parts of the device. Would probably have cost a few cents in manufacturing to add countermeasures to physical modification into the Ledgers. The fact that there is not even the slightest attempt at securing the device against this kind of attacks is entirely on the manufacturer.
> How a French (EU based) company is still in business after all of this, is an indicator of selective enforcement of EU privacy laws (GDPR, etc).
Surely you can name a dozen of US companies that have been driven out of business by enforcement of EU privacy laws. But I'd be glad if you'd at least name a single one!
I wonder why they only managed to steal 100M so far. Like with the order of effort needed, why haven't they waited for the really big fish to unlock their ledger?
because the longer they wait, the higher the chance of being discovered before they're able to steal anything. I'm sure there's some game theory about this
I hope they refer the exploit as "legerdemain"
Makes the claim from BI that Supermicro had malicious hardware implants a little more believable, eh?
Not really. We have physical proof of the compromised Ledger devices; no one has ever presented any specific evidence that Supermicro hardware was similarly compromised.
Reminds me of that time when state actors wanted to spread the Stuxnet worm into an air gapped nucleair facility in Iran, and basically hijacked the whole USB supply chain and put the worm in there.
When enough resources / money is involved, these things are to be expected.
Amazing, at least we have hackers stepping up to do the work the government refuses to.
Here’s a new market for $500 Faraday Cages, if any HN readers are interested in selling that
How did the attackers acquire valid, active Vodafone eSIMs without doxxing themselves?
https://kycnot.me/?categories=esim or simply used a fake identity on some online supplier's website.
UPD: NL, just like some other few countries in EU, doesn't require mandatory identification for SIM card purchases and activation
What a f-ing nightmare. It's stuff like this where I start to understand Apple's stance on right to repair. How do you maintain hardware security without strict provenance over every component in your device?
Even if you have perfect provenance over every component you put in, the moment it leaves your factory to be shipped to customers, it can be tampered with.
Even if you would hand it from the factory straight to a customer that comes physically to your factory to pick it up, then you would still require some sort of ID to know that that person is in fact the customer I suppose. Which removes some of the advantages of cryptocurrencies
Can see why hardware wallets seemed a good idea at the time but history has shown this is a terrible way to self custody. Compromised devices aside, the KYC data leaks have put people in danger too.
LOL why would anyone want a hardware wallet when you can just store your Bitcoins on your own encrypted hard disk or USB stick? Bitcoin is merely a file.
These people are being suckered into a false sense of security with hardware cryptowallets. I mean, it would be very tempting to sell a hardware wallet with a backdoor inside of it to steal everyone's cryptocurrency, wouldn't it?
"Because whoever can read the screen wins." This is a bit surprising from Heise.de?
At the bottom:
> This article was originally published in German. It was translated with technical assistance and editorially reviewed before publication.
Presumably "technical assistance" covers just about everything.
I bought from this very reseller in the last 90 days and I just opened my Stax with a knife to find out it was implanted. It is a very good job too, if I didn't watch the Youtube video, I would think it's part of the original Ledger hardware.
What made you purchase the ledger from a third party and not directly from ledger itself?
It's the official Ledger reseller in that country.
But why not order directly with ledger? They ship all over the world.
My thinking was it is safer to buy from an authorized reseller than just shipping it. Many people get to access your mail in transit. Granted the devices come in mail regardless for anyone but I thought maybe the authorized thing had some more due diligence or something.
That is reasonable. I hope you didn't lose your wallet.
So HW passkeys in general can also be compromised?
It's always fascinating to me to poke my head into the crypto ecosystem because so many problems people are encountering in it are just... solved in fiat-currency ecosystems.
Nothing like the monopoly on violence to severely discourage bad actors from executing something like this.
Why would they put all this effort in protecting the key within the chip and then go ahead and leak it via the screen?
Funny how all the rules of capitalism break down as you approach really big sums of money.
The #1 rule that you keep what you can get away with just seems to apply a lot harder. See also the Abramovich/Deloitte story on HN today.
Couldn't they trace the thief through the eSIM?
Why are theee no legal repurcussions to this?
It's a skimmer?
Looks like government's work to me. Why would someone risk a prison for this.
The tweet doesn't say that ledger installed the chip.
This is some D grade trash writing.
Back to paper wallets I guess.
You should have a paper backup of your hardware wallet anyway. The point of the wallet is to perform cryptographic calculations you’ll probably rather not do in your head.
This was stealing the seed phrases as they were being displayed so the user could make the paper backup you suggest and in the process have all their current and future coins stolen.
Yes, somehow the hardware wallet does need to import or export the seed phrase in some form.
I already commented the other day on this exploit but really it's fascinating.
I don't care about cryptocurrencies but I've always been fascinated by the cryptography behind it. I've also dabbled with hardware wallets for non-cryptocurrencies stuff: like U2F auth.
The idea of a master secret that is behind a secure element which I control and which I can duplicate is amazing to me (as opposed to, say, "your" passkeys which Google/Microsoft/Apple can basically backup and transfer to other devices for you).
But really to me in the cryptocurrencies world people have been sold the lie that a hardware wallet was secure: it's not. It could be tampered with (as happened in this hack, where an additional rogue chip reading the screen and then sending it using an eSIM steals the secret) but it can also contain a bug (like the recent Coldcard exploit where Coldcard hardware wallets fell back on a RNG with only 32 bits of entropy and some dark-hat hacker cracked those and stole Bitcoins) and, most of all, the vendor of the hardware wallet itself can do nasty attacks (like "kleptography").
From the very start everybody in the ecosystem should have pushed of "n-of-n" schemes (say even just 2-of-2), where one secret goes on a hardware wallet from one vendor and the other secret goes on a hardware wallet from another vendor.
For years and years the tune has been: "PCs cannot be trusted, use a hardware wallet" but it mislead people.
PCs indeed cannot be trusted but unsuspecting users should have learned how to use 2-of-2 or 3-of-3 schemes, to become immune from hacks affecting one hardware wallet vendor.
The typical, non-sensical, response to this is the idiotic: "but if you have two secrets, if you lose one of them you lose everything". It's totally idiotic for people basically save a list of 24 words (the "seed", which is the master secret). Well, guess what: instead of saving a list of 24 words, you save a list of 48 words. Exact same thing, just twice longer.
That's my take: the entire "your coins will be safe if you use a hardware wallet" was misguided.
(The previous comment ended up getting merged into this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50046048)
You might be interested by the Tillltis TKey - it's an open-source open-hardware programmable-by-the-user secure element.
m-of-n provides increased security AND redundancy.
2-of-3 allows loss of one key, 3-of-5 allows loss of two keys, etc
The cost is increased complexity, but the alternative is potentially losing everything due to a single mistake. So far people seem to overweigh the complexity of multisig, and to overestimate their understanding of using a single signing device.
finally, good use for eSIMs /s But damn, it's hard problem to fix. Put it in epoxy and while tampering is harder (not impossible! also can just replace whole module), you can't verify it
Crypto is a gift to scammers: billions stolen, victims left with little recourse, and no effective government oversight.
And yet on this exact website people critical of the industry were ridiculed with the exact same rhetoric adopted by the AI industry. It was touted by so many as inevitable, and how we will all be left behind if we don’t join the cult
I think hn was generally more skeptical of crypto then AI
It really depends the year, but yes, overall I think that’s correct, a majority rejected the crypto bull narrative. While also a significant number of people were pushing it. the same money behind the crypto push has been behind the AI push. And the same peer pressure arguments are used
+15 years later and it still doesn't do anything but provide idiots a way to lose their money. It really is impressive.
If you lie down with dogs, you will get up with fleas.
Dogs = cryptocurrencies. Fleas = scammed.
Yep. Crypto is more clever than I am—and there are scammers in the field equally so.
(My hardware wallet is made of pleather and holds paper bills.)
your fiat goes brrrrr
It's been going very well, yes thanks.
Much better than the average crypto gambler.
The cash has been acting as a medium of exchange (something the cryptocurrency industry has given up on, at this point), which is its job, and my wealth is in capital. And capital is what the world runs on. And it's done really well.
What is the use case of a hardware cryptocurrency wallet besides trapping bitcoins in the Shadow Realm?
Like any HSMs, to put private keys in it and to let things be signed with it.
Making sure malware on your PC can't steal your private keys.
Oh-Kay_Labs have said it for years. Not only hackers and thieves go for them, but also kidnappers and robbers. If anyone knows you have one, and things could be much worse. Use paper-wallets, old phones and encrypted USBs instead.
use leather wallets and paper cash...
Government currencies deflates at 15% a year, Bitcoin doesn't.
Bitcoin has lost 25% of it's value in the last year.
>Use paper-wallets, old phones and encrypted USBs instead.
None of these prevent thieves or anybody from knowing you have one worth stealing. The actual solution is to not use fundamentally broken transparent crypto like BTC that broadcasts to the whole world your exact funds and ties them to your identity on every transaction. With monero your funds could be 0,10 or 10 billion and that is nobody's business.
Or just open a bank account like a normal person. But I suppose that requires deprogramming yourself out of the crypto cult.
Garbage website that doesn't allow me to reject tracking cookies without paying.
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Just delete the cookies after if you absolutely must go to the site.
Most websites do this, they just don't give you the option.