alt Hacker NewsWho Is Planting Backdoors in Ledger Crypto Wallets?
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I just opened a ledger up, its stupid easy to do. Why wouldn't they make this a sealed unit with and glue it to make it impossible to open without damaging? Also why would you not glue the entire circuit board? The entire board is covered in test pads which make it super easy to solder dodgy stuff onto.
Shouldn't it be possible to track who bought the esim, where the data is sent, and who owns the wallets where the stolen crypto is transferred?
The lack of security on these devices is shocking as someone who has worked in the hardware security space, but I guess it shouldn't be surprising that this like everything else involving crypto is some sort of elaborate scam done by non-experts and bad actors.
These attacks are easily done because a lot of people assume new hardware in bubble wrap is secure and wasn’t altered. There are many stories of intelligence agencies bugging the hardware after you order it, specifically online, and no, those aren’t some tinfoil hat thinking, they are actively doing it incl Europe, so always buy your device randomly from some local store and pick it up immediately, or buy it used, better yet, if you have some electronics knowledge is checking it yourself.
The thing with eSIMs is that they are bound to an operator, which is supposed to keep record of who is using them. Law enforcement authorities should be able to get to the guys doing this...
... unless they are tied to a government.
how can the implant send the seed words to an attacker? doesn't a crypto wallet have to talk an application on the host computer? wouldn't the communication between the wallet and the host computer never allow for the seed words to be sent from the wallet to the outside world? in other words how could an "implant" tampering of the wallet make the host computer suddenly start sending seed phrases to third parties?
The idea of a hardware wallet sounded wronged to me from the start.
Why would you trust some random hardware, that has the sole purpose of holding your money, making it an obvious target, over a general purpose computer you control entirely?
Related:
Ledger confirms spy chip implant behind wallet crypto thefts
So where does the implanted chip upload the seed phrase to? Who owns that website? This seems like it should have been caught with wireshark or network sniffing of the Ledger app?
I believe an untampered Ledger is still OK as long as you don't pair it with a compromised machine, which perhaps is not saying much at the present moment...
-Post removed as this account is rate limited and I can't reply to comments-
The crypto lunatic fringe have long frustrated me with their assertions of sovereign this and that.
There is no sovereignty in crypto if YOU ARE NOT BUILDING YOUR OWN HARDWARE.
Any claims of sanctity or reliability in the software stack are rendered null and void until someone with a tunneling electron microscope has completed an audit of your chips.
THIS is why Taiwan matters so much, people: there is NO sovereignty for as long as your chips are being imported. You can trust all you want - but trust is nothing without verification. We are all serf-subjects of the wafer-producing overlords.
Ledger clearly drank the koolaid. Crypto people: invest in hardware. NOT software. Anything less is utter futility.
Every bitcoin in existence will eventually be hacked. It's just a matter of time.
Some chollima, its always a chollima.
When people will understand that a "cryptowallet is a simple Aphanumeric sequence. Why would you need a hardware trick if all you have to do is scan for a match. Crypto has always been a scam, ask yourself do you know anyone of your friends that made it with crypto!
Looking at the images here, there is zero attempt at security here from the ledger team. They’re using an MCU (ST MCU with Cortex M4 core) that doesn’t have any meaningful security features (ie, no secure boot, no differentiation between trusted and user mode operation - features the newer Cortex M33 core supports and newer ST parts implement). So there’s no way to guarantee that the software running on this has not been tampered with.
There is no physical tamper detection either. No tamper pads to detect case openings, no seal that gets broken when it’s opened that prevents operation. As others have mentioned, the most basic precaution would be to glue the whole thing together, which they didn’t do either.
Trusting Ledger with securing anything secret would be a very bad idea.