The cryptocurrencies they can be stored in a wide variety of places. We can have them in the exchange portals (not a recommended option), in a wallet on our computer (recommended, but with a backup), and we can also store them offline in devices similar to flash drives. A company that claimed that theirs weren’t hackable just saw it as a 15-year-old boy has left them in evidence.
Ledger, specialized in cryptocurrency wallets, has been hacked
The company is called ledger, and she is french. They have always boasted that their hardware to store cryptocurrencies is so sure no one can corrupt them without their owners realizing it. To do this, they use a technique called Anonymous Attestation, or anonymous declaration, which creates unforgeable signatures so that only approved code is executed. In 2015, the company said it was impossible for an attacker to be able to replace the firmware and make it go through the declaration process without knowing Ledger’s private key.
However, a 15-year-old from the UK has shown that this is not the case. The boy called Saleem Rashid, explained how aA backdoor found on the Ledger Nano S, what is it worth 100 dollars and of which the company claims have already sold millions. It also works with the Ledger Blue, despite being the high-end one and costing $200.
The back door only has 300 bytes and makes the device generate default wallet addresses and passwords known to the attacker. Thus, the attacker can enter the password in the wallet to retrieve the keys that the old device stores for those addresses. Doing that, if we try send money to someone else, a attacker can change direction and put on his own, as well as also change the amount. The exploit allows you to do all of this while also having physical access to the device.
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Cryptocurrencies continue to sink for control over them Carlos Gonzalez 18 March, 2018 • 18:03
It is very difficult for them to fix it with software
The company released a patch two weeks ago for the Nano S, and claim that the vulnerability was not critical and that the attack did not allow private keys to be extracted, to which Rashid replied that the latter was a lie.
Rashid has not yet tested whether the method works on already patched devices. However, he claims that a key part of Ledge’s hardware design makes it very likely that with a simple modification can be made to work again. The system takes advantage of a vulnerability in the way in which the microcontrollers inside communicate.
A John Hopkins University professor named Matt Green has reviewed Rashid’s post, and believes that it is very unlikely that the patch released this month has fixed the vulnerability. The security chip cannot know what code is running on the processor, so it has to ask the processor itself and “trust” it to be legitimate.
