>>> To every other developer: we believe this is a sober reality of the new AI paradigm. AI-assisted code review can now find latent bugs at a speed that is outpacing even the industry’s most seasoned experts. If your firmware is open-source or has ever been public, assume it's already being read by attackers and defenders alike.
Kinda turns the “many eyes” principle of OSS on its head, eh?
This article is bad because its adspam bullshit, and doesnt explain the vulnerability...
.. but this stupidest thing coinkite did was their dogshit design: Trying to inject their RNG logic into lower levels and hoping 3rd party libraries (through micropython) used them correctly... rather than just using their hardware dependencies directly.
That design, and all bugs that came out of it, seems massively and avoidably stupid
"This is hugely damaging to the people who believe that 8 billion people will hold their Bitcoin in cold storage in the future," Lawrence said. "That dream is over. Done."
Sky is falling stuff. Actual cryptography experts have shown the importance (and difficulty) of random number generation for ages. Yes, if your "hardware wallet" aka computer and software is implemented poorly you will have issues.
Crypto people make fun of me for making up passwords in my head, but my brain RNG has never been exploited, nor has anyone successfully Sherlock'd my password.
If it's long enough it's fine. They key property for passphrases is being able to remember them. But diceware phrases where you actually roll dice are stronger, and has evident verifiability.
RNG on computers is still hard, and a proper HSM has a carefully designed source of randomness and mixing. I'd trust Yubikey RNG mixing into Linux urandom much more than a random hardware wallet developer.
Yeah, something very cool is XOR can only improve randomness as long as there's no correlation between the sources. So Linux RNG XOR'd with this comment is even better than it's source!
This is really bad. This is going to set bitcoin back years.. if it ever comes back. There really is no point and no real use case for it outside of crime. Unless the whole world order collapses in which case we'll have bigger problems..
- Yes it is bad, but there have been plenty of larger scale hardships in the past decade.
- No it will not set back Bitcoin years
- The US dollar is used for much more crime than Bitcoin ever has been
- The financial world is collapsing in front of our eyes. The US dollar is inflating 8-12% every year, and the federal government wants to raise the debt ceiling even further. If you haven't realized how Bitcoin saves you from this by this point there's no point in trying to convince you otherwise.
That advisory would probably be more helpful if it described what the actual issue is. (I’m thinking maybe some content got lost when the Update at the top was added?)
so there was $70 million just sitting there for five years in the open that anyone could have taken. Nuts.
Enticed by riches, hackers worldwide are now going through all firmware source code , wit the help of the latest AI models, for all wallets to find misconfigurations and other problems. Expect more thefts from low entropy bugs. AI has clearly been shown to be more more adept at auditing code than humans.
Not the same. And it's not like the same scams don't exist for crypto. Even worse, many of them are automated. One bad npm install could swipe my crypto, but probably not my bank account.
From the Twitter advisory [1]:
>>> To every other developer: we believe this is a sober reality of the new AI paradigm. AI-assisted code review can now find latent bugs at a speed that is outpacing even the industry’s most seasoned experts. If your firmware is open-source or has ever been public, assume it's already being read by attackers and defenders alike.
Kinda turns the “many eyes” principle of OSS on its head, eh?
[1] https://x.com/nvk/status/2083216713693151552?s=61
Been saying it for years, default values are a bad idea!
This article is bad because its adspam bullshit, and doesnt explain the vulnerability...
.. but this stupidest thing coinkite did was their dogshit design: Trying to inject their RNG logic into lower levels and hoping 3rd party libraries (through micropython) used them correctly... rather than just using their hardware dependencies directly. That design, and all bugs that came out of it, seems massively and avoidably stupid
Incredible hyperbole from the Amicus guy:
"This is hugely damaging to the people who believe that 8 billion people will hold their Bitcoin in cold storage in the future," Lawrence said. "That dream is over. Done."
Sky is falling stuff. Actual cryptography experts have shown the importance (and difficulty) of random number generation for ages. Yes, if your "hardware wallet" aka computer and software is implemented poorly you will have issues.
Crypto people make fun of me for making up passwords in my head, but my brain RNG has never been exploited, nor has anyone successfully Sherlock'd my password.
If it's long enough it's fine. They key property for passphrases is being able to remember them. But diceware phrases where you actually roll dice are stronger, and has evident verifiability.
RNG on computers is still hard, and a proper HSM has a carefully designed source of randomness and mixing. I'd trust Yubikey RNG mixing into Linux urandom much more than a random hardware wallet developer.
Yeah, something very cool is XOR can only improve randomness as long as there's no correlation between the sources. So Linux RNG XOR'd with this comment is even better than it's source!
This is really bad. This is going to set bitcoin back years.. if it ever comes back. There really is no point and no real use case for it outside of crime. Unless the whole world order collapses in which case we'll have bigger problems..
- Yes it is bad, but there have been plenty of larger scale hardships in the past decade. - No it will not set back Bitcoin years - The US dollar is used for much more crime than Bitcoin ever has been - The financial world is collapsing in front of our eyes. The US dollar is inflating 8-12% every year, and the federal government wants to raise the debt ceiling even further. If you haven't realized how Bitcoin saves you from this by this point there's no point in trying to convince you otherwise.
Spot the bug!
Coldcard Security Advisory: https://blog.coinkite.com/coldcard-mk3-seed-generation-warni...
That advisory would probably be more helpful if it described what the actual issue is. (I’m thinking maybe some content got lost when the Update at the top was added?)
There must be a fascinated industry dedicated to cracking old, orphan, lost and forgotten accounts with bad seeds and entropy.
Wired's story on Joe Grand is the tip of the iceberg.
https://www.wired.com/story/roboform-password-3-million-doll...
so there was $70 million just sitting there for five years in the open that anyone could have taken. Nuts.
Enticed by riches, hackers worldwide are now going through all firmware source code , wit the help of the latest AI models, for all wallets to find misconfigurations and other problems. Expect more thefts from low entropy bugs. AI has clearly been shown to be more more adept at auditing code than humans.
Meanwhile nobody has ever been able to hack a bank. Probably because they employ the actual pros unlike crypto.
And their source code isnt wide open for analysis
> Nobody has been able to hack a bank
Bro, people lose hundreds of millions of dollars to bank scams on a yearly basis.
Not the same. And it's not like the same scams don't exist for crypto. Even worse, many of them are automated. One bad npm install could swipe my crypto, but probably not my bank account.