Security vulnerabilities in cryptocurrency hardware wallets leading to theft of assets

Signals over time

2 observed signals across 1 sources, tracked for 3 days. Confidence: low.

What people are saying Observed

• “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 sho”

  Hacker News · complaint

• “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). W”

  Hacker News · complaint