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teravor 22 hours ago [-]
the thief appears sloppy in how they stole the coins. multiple waves, linking outputs together etc.
sschueller 13 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.
jpfromlondon 12 hours ago [-]
would be interesting to see what happens to them when they're found, shame we'll never know.
gblargg 13 hours ago [-]
Who would ever trust the built-in seed generation of a wallet? Diceware, write them down, then enter them into the wallet.
inigyou 9 hours 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.
DANmode 2 hours ago [-]
Yes, a different security level - in this case, possibly a better one!
inigyou 1 hours ago [-]
Only in this case, where your hardware wallet is severely compromised. But if you believe your hardware wallet is compromised, why are you using it?
paulpauper 23 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 .
lern_too_spel 22 hours ago [-]
Better now than later. It would have been even better a decade ago, but here we are.
frogperson 20 hours ago [-]
Will this just trigger a crypto arms race? Bigger and tougher proof of work?
patrickthebold 19 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.
miladyincontrol 17 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.
cma 17 hours ago [-]
Claude has found some weaknesses in other schemes, but not fully breaking anything yet:
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.
r_lee 14 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
lux-lux-lux 8 hours ago [-]
Setting aside any utility it might have, crypto has lots of negative externalities besides energy usage. The event under discussion, for example.
Most would have blamed the card holder as was seen in the initial few posts that showed up on reddit.
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.
Tests should have caught that, and it should not have simply failed open during the most critical part of entropy generation.
https://www.anthropic.com/research/discovering-cryptographic...
like, why does it even matter? I doubt the energy usage is anywhere near AI workloads running today