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Posted by thm 1 day ago

Ledger confirms spy chip implant behind wallet crypto thefts(www.bleepingcomputer.com)
https://www.heise.de/en/news/Crypto-thieves-sell-hardware-wa...

https://crypto.news/ledger-confirms-hidden-chip-in-crypto-wa...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JnHdr30v4g

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nf4FEFlgv3Q

https://www.tibane.net/research/ledger-nano-x-implant

331 points | 284 commentspage 4
ArtRichards 12 hours ago|
"Because whoever can read the screen wins." This is a bit surprising from Heise.de?
tom_ 8 hours ago|
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.

jmakov 1 day ago||
So HW passkeys in general can also be compromised?
csomar 2 hours ago||
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.
artisinal 2 hours ago|
What made you purchase the ledger from a third party and not directly from ledger itself?
csomar 2 hours ago||
It's the official Ledger reseller in that country.
artisinal 1 hour ago||
But why not order directly with ledger? They ship all over the world.
csomar 1 hour ago||
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.
artisinal 1 hour ago||
That is reasonable. I hope you didn't lose your wallet.
csomar 1 hour ago||
Nope. Though I did leave a few hundreds just to see if it was compromised after all.
dauertewigkeit 1 day ago||
Funny how all the rules of capitalism break down as you approach really big sums of money.
pjc50 1 day ago|
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.
shadowgovt 3 hours ago||
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.

charcircuit 3 hours ago||
Why would they put all this effort in protecting the key within the chip and then go ahead and leak it via the screen?
codedokode 13 hours ago||
Looks like government's work to me. Why would someone risk a prison for this.
tantalor 11 hours ago||
It's a skimmer?
brcmthrowaway 4 hours ago||
Couldn't they trace the thief through the eSIM?

Why are theee no legal repurcussions to this?

jacquesm 36 minutes ago|
Possibly, there is a lot of KYC involved in setting up an eSIM virtual provider but the party that ordered the eSIMs may not be in the know, and the attacker may have obfuscated their credentials or used high quality fakes.
TacticalCoder 13 hours ago|
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.

cowlevel 12 hours ago||
You might be interested by the Tillltis TKey - it's an open-source open-hardware programmable-by-the-user secure element.
dang 4 hours ago|||
(The previous comment ended up getting merged into this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50046048)
thinkmassive 11 hours ago||
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.

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