Bitcoin cold-wallet attack spreads to 4,500 addresses as losses near $89M

Posted by rbanffy 15 hours ago

Comments

Comment by teravor 14 hours ago

the thief appears sloppy in how they stole the coins. multiple waves, linking outputs together etc.

Comment by sschueller 5 hours ago

Yep, also greedy. If he only emptied a few large wallets and sent them to different addresses each also not all at the same time the vulnerability may not have been discovered so quickly.

Most would have blamed the card holder as was seen in the initial few posts that showed up on reddit.

Comment by jpfromlondon 4 hours ago

would be interesting to see what happens to them when they're found, shame we'll never know.

Comment by gblargg 5 hours ago

Who would ever trust the built-in seed generation of a wallet? Diceware, write them down, then enter them into the wallet.

Comment by inigyou 1 hour ago

Because it's a hardware wallet. Usually these are designed to provide security by generating their own private keys and never letting the private key leave the hardware wallet. If you input the private key, you don't have the same security level.

Comment by paulpauper 15 hours ago

The bigger disaster is awaiting. hackers are now reviewing source code of everything crypto related for entropy or other misconfiguration bugs, automated with leading AI models , which will spot errors humans missed. We're talking wallets dating back to 2010 when btc was founded, and then for all the altcoins. Ppl don't realize how bad this will get when exploit detection can be done at scale with LLMs. Ai can review a codebase in minutes, which would take humans days, if ever. Coldcard is a tiny wallet service. A bigger one would have losses in excess of billions. A hacker will first find the vulnerability and then exhaust the keyspace and download the blockchain to cue up the keys and do it all at once .

Comment by lern_too_spel 14 hours ago

Better now than later. It would have been even better a decade ago, but here we are.

Comment by frogperson 12 hours ago

Will this just trigger a crypto arms race? Bigger and tougher proof of work?

Comment by patrickthebold 11 hours ago

Unlikely. The digital signatures bitcoin uses are regarded as secure, (there could be attacks if we get quantum computers.) The issue here was the software didn't put in enough randomness when generating the keys, and so it was straight forward to search the small space of keys the wallet would generate.

It's not so different if you encrypted a file with a weak password and someone guessed it—you don't need stronger encryption, you need to pick a better password.

The proof of work part of bitcoin is really for "consensus", so everyone agrees which transactions happened in which order, this attack didn't affect that part at all.

Comment by miladyincontrol 9 hours ago

The issue is they forked sane GPL code (Trezor's), then decided they wanted no one to be able to copy them in turn so they rewrote components and messed up entropy. IIRC they intended to still use the secure element to generate some but it failed open and had no meaningful tests to detect so, leading to significantly fewer bytes for years.

Tests should have caught that, and it should not have simply failed open during the most critical part of entropy generation.

Comment by cma 9 hours ago

Claude has found some weaknesses in other schemes, but not fully breaking anything yet:

https://www.anthropic.com/research/discovering-cryptographic...

Comment by waste_monk 7 hours ago

I am always hopeful that something like this might kill cryptocurrency (although I don't believe it will) - if a critical mass lose confidence in it, the network effect would collapse and people might stop wasting terawatt-hours of power on NFTs and exit scams.

Comment by r_lee 6 hours ago

why do you care so much about that? NFTs are basically dead already and crypto is still somewhat niche

like, why does it even matter? I doubt the energy usage is anywhere near AI workloads running today

Comment by lux-lux-lux 21 minutes ago

Setting aside any utility it might have, crypto has lots of negative externalities besides energy usage. The event under discussion, for example.