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.
This is a great observation! I regularly end up with M33 devices I program as they make sense for reasons other than security. (E.g. an Atmosic one, and St ones like L5/U5/H5). I look at the secure flash functionality and think "This is annoying and I have no current or projected use for this."
I ponder "What applications would I want this security stuff for?" Crypto wallets are a great example... and the crypto wallets in the wild aren't using them, as you point out!
It's just amazing to me sometimes that people get so far with so little sense of professional responsibility. I have no particular expertise in hardware security and even I would have made put more effort in. And this company has been around since 2014! What excuse can there be?
Edit: For folks down voting me, please explain. I'm genuinely curious about your perspective.
> 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).
This doesn't help any bit against the hardware implant we're discussing here.
> So there’s no way to guarantee that the software running on this has not been tampered with.
While true, I don't think it matters too much, other than the possibility of turning the device into something like a rubberducky.
> 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.
Now that is the real meat. Unfortunately, for any given attack it's possible to bypass it. Tamper pads, if you know where they are, you can drill through the housing and, depending what it is, keep the button pressed by a jig, or solder wires if it's a sense trace to bridge it. The housing itself can easily be fully replicated, it's just a matter of coughing up some money for custom molds.
The only way to make something relatively tamper proof is to use injection molding over the full housing with something like glitter as part of the plastic, that will distribute randomly - and most importantly: not replicable! - across the housing, and then take high quality photographs and store them on your website together with the serial number.
That way the customer can photograph the device they have, and compare the random glitter specks with those on the website.
Tamper proofing hardware is among the hardest things there are, especially if you are up against nation-state actors like North Korea (that has been known to engage in cryptocurrency theft in the past).
While secure boot and the other software features might not have defended against this attempt, it highlights the abject failure of the company to even make an attempt at security.
You bring up a good point about bypassing physical tamper detection, but those defenses increase the cost and complexity of the attack, making them harder to succeed undetected. As it is, this attack seemed quite trivial to implement.
Isn’t it all moot if you’re buying from a reseller rather than the manufacturer? Because I’m thinking your photos to compare the glitter with will be provided by the middle man anyway
not really. nor does the glitter and the photo really help. problem is they will infiltrate vendor ,or maybe your ISP or he device u take picture with, replace photo.
u would need something that you do not have to check online which is physically given to you by a known person. who do you really know at the vendor? no one. there isnt this person.
that being said,.so it comes back to trusting someone if you are dealing with digital things, somewhere down the line. That trust can be attacked, so u need to ne aware of it and if anything dont put all your eggs in the same basket.
Say you have 10 million$. you would want to split it up in chunks the size of your acceptable loss * the chances of such loss occurring, so that whenever you lose something, its within accepted risk parameters :')
I just opened a ledger up, its stupid easy to do. Why wouldn't they make this a sealed unit with and glue it to make it impossible to open without damaging? Also why would you not glue the entire circuit board? The entire board is covered in test pads which make it super easy to solder dodgy stuff onto.
different models are subject to different levels of physical security. for example, the Nano Gen5 is extremely hard to open without some form of physical damage
At the price of an eSIM and a LTE modem (and of the stolen 100$M), destroying a glued casing and making your own costs next to nothing. Looking at the photos, even without the test pads soldering directly on the components seem pretty easy.
Last year there were ones going around with these eSIM modules in them and they appeared to have printed new 3D cases for them, so it's definitely something they have experimented with.
I had an old Ledger die recently and replaced it with a new one. Didn't even consider being potentially able to replace the battery, but it would have been nice.
On the plus side, I did get to do a "fire drill" of my recovery process, which did work, so that was nice.
I'm a large believer of long-living tools and things in general, so I prefer my tools to be repairable and maintainable.
Of course I can't achieve what I want all the time, but being able to use a fixed-function tool till some electronic component dies inside is way more attractive for me to send the same device to recycling or trash just because a part with limited life (and shorter time w.r.t. rest of the device in general) reaches ends of its life.
Sony SRF-39FP has a transparent case, designed to thwart contraband concealment. The radio often appears on the commissary lists of U.S. federal prisons, hence the "FP" suffix
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SRF-39
Sony D-FJ003FP, Sony WM-FX193FP, SONY SRF-M35FP
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.
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...
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?
They were almost certainly not doing the OCR on the device. Such a CPU would be too power-hungry and the process would still be too error-prone given the limited compute. They would just send the raw data to the C2, which could send it to an emulator, snapshot the output and send it to an LLM.
Streaming the raw data would also be more flexible for other use cases. From what I've read, it was streaming off the generated recovery passphrase, but users aren't required to generate one--they can input one. That'd require a much more sophisticated algorithm than simply reading from the screen, since users are using two buttons to pick from hundreds of words in a randomized menu.
And besides, Ledger firmware can be updated to change fonts and such so it'd be long-term safer to just stream the raw data.
Though it's not what happened in this case, you could tamper with a crypto wallet to make it emulate a USB keyboard and once connected, send a series of keystrokes to download and run an exploit.
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 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?
Strictly speaking, a hardware wallet doesn't hold your "money". Your assets live on the blockchain, and your seed phrase generates the private keys that control them.
The hardware wallet is just a sandboxed interface between you, your seed, and the blockchain. It requires a computer to connect to you and the internet.
In other words: as long as you have your seed phrase (and your passphrase, if you set one) on a piece of paper, you can smash your hardware wallet to bits and be fine.
(This assumes a standard single-signature wallet using the BIP-39 standard)
If there was ever any appeal to me, it’s that vague notion that machines get wiped, rebuilt, compromised, travel, get stolen, etc. A dedicated device could kinda avoid some of that if it mostly sits in a safe or something.
Your general purpose computer is connected to the internet 24/7. It runs a complex operating system which constantly gets updated and patched. It visits dodgy websites, downloads npm packages, backs up files to the cloud, etc.
Yes, you can certainly use an air gapped laptop as a dedicated hardware wallet.
But now you need to generate a public key to send to someone so you can receive coins. How are you sending that key to your friend? Are you going to read character by character and manually type up the string?
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...
The security model of Ledger wallets should survive even a compromised computer/phone, assuming you have an out-of-band way to compare address destinations and hashes.
All hw wallets are being breached. Big, easy target. I think a lot of people are interested in this breach and the people behind it. 100 million worth? This might works both ways.. curious about the further investigations. My hunch… after major crackdowns on scam centers in the golden triangle, this is their latest dab to wealth?
Stable coins are spreading like wildfire in Asia. It’s poised to overtake even the US is terms of spending. People use it to send money back home and ledgers MITM attack happened in Asia.
Ledger the company was not breached (this time around). The devices here were modified by a middleman in the distribution chain and sold to unsuspecting buyers.
You need to have reseller in most countries otherwise your customers will have to deal with long shipping time, customs, etc. The same for selling in physical stores.
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.
Yes, you're missing that grabbing an airgapped PC with a fresh debian install is less fool-proof than you are proposing. The victims here thought they were buying an airgapped device but due to a supply-chain attack they were not actually airgapped. Of course the odds of their being a secret modem in a random PC you buy to be your own homebrew ledger device are nearly 0 -- but it's certainly not impossible or even difficult for a motivated attacker -- it's just unlikely because there would usually not be enough value in snooping on a device like that. What you are talking about is just security through obscurity, not actual security.
That's an impractical stance, there's always another layer down.
Supply chain risk is real, and it has to be managed in realistic terms.
For me, this is the weak link in the chain for digital assets, and always has been, but the mitigation is simple: no one hardware wallet should have millions of dollars of assets on it. Split it up, and use different techniques, different vendors, with different supply chains.
You can be the multi yourself. Choose diverse hardware (ie, not all the same Ledger) and your likelihood of compromise changes significantly in your favor.
Sure, loss of seed material would be catastrophic so have a backup scheme. The point isn’t that you can make it perfect, but there’s laughably risky and imperfect solutions and putting everything on a single key HW device like this is the poster child.
Not sure what you mean? Taiwan, imported, isnt taiwan the biggest exporter of high end chips? 100% these have not been hacked in Taiwan. You mean setting up your own fab? I am confused
Because it works... The level of counterfeit currency is readily measurable. Currency can be withdrawn and replaced. Individual stolen notes can be tracked. Counterfeiting of the dollar and the euro today is a relatively minor problem
There counterfeiting is not the issue; it’s unauthorized transfers or alterations to the account ledger. In both cases there are many layers of backup record keeping and procedures to investigate and correct errors.
But, assuming you are like the vast majority of people, most of you money is virtual in bank accounts and such. There doesn not exist enough physical currency to back all the virtual money in the accounts.
You sound sarcastic but it's true. Unless you have government-level resources, you can't make a perfect $20 bill. They don't use paper--water would destroy it--they use a special fabric with a single supplier that only sells to the government. They don't print; they stamp. There are watermarks, security strips, and other features that can't easily be reproduced. Doing it right would be a massive investment, at the risk of being caught and losing everything.
It's very very very very hard to forge money convincingly enough to fool central banks. It's basically impossible for anyone but nation-state actors, and the only known cases date back decades. Today, it's even harder, because even if central banks were unable to identify forgeries, duplicate serial numbers or ones that have never been issued would be detected very quickly.
Even making forgeries that can fool normal automated tests, like those done in an ATM, is incredibly hard. It's certainly possible, just way too expensive.
1) We have a legal system which (not perfectly) can reverse or fix issues which arise, with crypto money, it's just gone.
2) Someone who can produce fake colourful paper will typically only be able to produce a fairly small amount and not destabilize the whole currency. In the rare occurrences where someone found a significant hack in a crypto-currency, it's just done.
It's very hard to steal a lot of physical currency.. Even with the biggest bills, it becomes unmanageable. Digitally it obviously doesn't matter if your transferring 1 Bitcoin or 10K
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!
"ask yourself do you know anyone of your friends that made it with crypto!" yes. Why would you use such an easily falsifiable example? I'm sure there's plenty of other points in your preference's favor.
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.
I ponder "What applications would I want this security stuff for?" Crypto wallets are a great example... and the crypto wallets in the wild aren't using them, as you point out!
Edit: For folks down voting me, please explain. I'm genuinely curious about your perspective.
This doesn't help any bit against the hardware implant we're discussing here.
> So there’s no way to guarantee that the software running on this has not been tampered with.
While true, I don't think it matters too much, other than the possibility of turning the device into something like a rubberducky.
> 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.
Now that is the real meat. Unfortunately, for any given attack it's possible to bypass it. Tamper pads, if you know where they are, you can drill through the housing and, depending what it is, keep the button pressed by a jig, or solder wires if it's a sense trace to bridge it. The housing itself can easily be fully replicated, it's just a matter of coughing up some money for custom molds.
The only way to make something relatively tamper proof is to use injection molding over the full housing with something like glitter as part of the plastic, that will distribute randomly - and most importantly: not replicable! - across the housing, and then take high quality photographs and store them on your website together with the serial number.
That way the customer can photograph the device they have, and compare the random glitter specks with those on the website.
Tamper proofing hardware is among the hardest things there are, especially if you are up against nation-state actors like North Korea (that has been known to engage in cryptocurrency theft in the past).
You bring up a good point about bypassing physical tamper detection, but those defenses increase the cost and complexity of the attack, making them harder to succeed undetected. As it is, this attack seemed quite trivial to implement.
u would need something that you do not have to check online which is physically given to you by a known person. who do you really know at the vendor? no one. there isnt this person.
that being said,.so it comes back to trusting someone if you are dealing with digital things, somewhere down the line. That trust can be attacked, so u need to ne aware of it and if anything dont put all your eggs in the same basket.
Say you have 10 million$. you would want to split it up in chunks the size of your acceptable loss * the chances of such loss occurring, so that whenever you lose something, its within accepted risk parameters :')
(https://support.ledger.com/article/4404382029329-zd)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potting_%28electronics%29
Maybe it increases the price quite a lot, IDK.
On the plus side, I did get to do a "fire drill" of my recovery process, which did work, so that was nice.
Of course I can't achieve what I want all the time, but being able to use a fixed-function tool till some electronic component dies inside is way more attractive for me to send the same device to recycling or trash just because a part with limited life (and shorter time w.r.t. rest of the device in general) reaches ends of its life.
https://www.thehenryford.org/collections/explore/artifact/40...
... unless they are tied to a government.
And besides, Ledger firmware can be updated to change fonts and such so it'd be long-term safer to just stream the raw data.
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?
The hardware wallet is just a sandboxed interface between you, your seed, and the blockchain. It requires a computer to connect to you and the internet.
In other words: as long as you have your seed phrase (and your passphrase, if you set one) on a piece of paper, you can smash your hardware wallet to bits and be fine.
(This assumes a standard single-signature wallet using the BIP-39 standard)
I never did get one, though.
Thus the attack surface is far greater.
But now you need to generate a public key to send to someone so you can receive coins. How are you sending that key to your friend? Are you going to read character by character and manually type up the string?
It's all tradeoffs.
Ledger confirms spy chip implant behind wallet crypto thefts
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50054092
The impacted resellers would have to test the devices powered on to see if they were using cellular data.
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.
not your hardware, not your keys
not your chips, not your hardware
not manufactured in house, not your chips
not your designs, not manufactured by you
not designed by you personally, not your designs
ad infinitum. To be truly secure, you must first learn to survive alone in the wilderness and smelt tin
I'll just order my crucible and tongs off Alibaba.
Wait a second...
(I agree in general, I'm just exploring the statement).
Grab the Bitcoin white paper and an airgapped PC with a fresh Debian install.
Implement the algorithm(s) in the white paper to generate yourself a private key and then a wallet address from that.
Send bitcoin to that wallet. Write down the private key and wallet address, store it somewhere safe, bury it in the garden, whatever.
No special hardware is required for any of this...
Or am I missing something?
Supply chain risk is real, and it has to be managed in realistic terms.
For me, this is the weak link in the chain for digital assets, and always has been, but the mitigation is simple: no one hardware wallet should have millions of dollars of assets on it. Split it up, and use different techniques, different vendors, with different supply chains.
You will never be completely secure against failure, the only way to protect yourself is to be able to robustly recover from failure.
I'd rather be able to say "every single government is in my hardware and they still can't touch it."
Perhaps possible with multisig, but now you're basically back to trusting banks.
Sure, loss of seed material would be catastrophic so have a backup scheme. The point isn’t that you can make it perfect, but there’s laughably risky and imperfect solutions and putting everything on a single key HW device like this is the poster child.
There might be a strict hardware audit process for cryptographic accelerators on IBM Z machines though, I'm not sure, I'm gonna ask though.
These industries are just not sexy enough for the crypto folks to want to learn from, or about.
https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/pr/date/2025/html/ecb.pr2502... https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/statistics/banknote https://www.cranecurrency.com/news-insights/85-decline-in-us...
Even making forgeries that can fool normal automated tests, like those done in an ATM, is incredibly hard. It's certainly possible, just way too expensive.
1) We have a legal system which (not perfectly) can reverse or fix issues which arise, with crypto money, it's just gone.
2) Someone who can produce fake colourful paper will typically only be able to produce a fairly small amount and not destabilize the whole currency. In the rare occurrences where someone found a significant hack in a crypto-currency, it's just done.