Bitcoin Forum

An interesting article on ArsTechnica today: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/04/new-hacks-siphon-private-cryptocurrency-keys-from-airgapped-wallets/

Seems the "hackers" have found a number of methods for exfiltrating information from air-gapped machines... :o :o :o I especially like the usage of GPIO pins on a RaspberryPi to generate radio waves! 8)

The recommendation for protecting from these attacks? Essentially it involves putting your cold storage device in a faraday cage! :o ::)

NOTE: before you get tooooo paranoid, these attacks all require that the cold storage device is compromised.

Nice concept. It seems like the main point is that cold storage isn't safe when someone else has access to it. It seems like that would be the same with every wallet (ahem Ledger), hardware wallet or not. The whole attack hinges on the designing of the malware and I'm not sure how easy it would be.

The best precaution when using fully air gapped method is to just secure it in a safe, since malware attacks won't really be viable.

Physical access to a device will always be a problem. Some guys even found ways to extract private keys from a Trezor a

while ago, albeit with special tools. I created 1000s of Paper wallets on a cheap old notebook and printer and after I printed

them, I physically destroyed the hardware. {crushed & melted it} A cheap setup like that, will not cost you more than $200.   

That's the important bit :)

Not getting your system compromised is one of the reason you air gap them in the first place. The other thing is that this also means that hardware wallets are not affected by this attack, so hooray for hardware wallets!



Trezor bugs are usually fixed swiftly, but some guys even found ways to extract private keys from Bitcoiners a while ago, albeit with special tools:

https://cointelegraph.com/news/man-robbed-at-gunpoint-for-1100-worth-of-bitcoins-in-brooklyn
https://cointelegraph.com/news/russia-blogger-who-boasted-about-crypto-wealth-beaten-and-robbed-for-425k
https://www.express.co.uk/finance/city/910958/Bitcoin-ripple-ethereum-UK-robbery-cryptocurrency-armed-thugs-oxfordshire-news-latest

Physical access is not just a technological problem, unfortunately.



I like your style ;D

These concepts are not new, spy agencies and expert hackers have a lot of methods for stealing data from air-gapped machines, but they are very complicated and require some complex setup, so it's very unlikely that someone with this level of expertise would target private users. Big targets like exchanges should be the ones who must be worried about such attacks, especially with the risks of rogue employees helping those hackers by installing some devices or software.

Before I reply I would like to say that the ministry of Bitcoin propaganda runs this forum and keeps removing posts.

I looked into these air-gap bridges and you can download apps from play store that produce spectra graphs and you can
even send and receive cartoon like images using nothing more than sound.

Turns out that some TV adverts are using sound to communicate with apps ruining on "Smart Phone" so this is not science
fiction and is fact.

Developers should keep away from using any microsoft blackbox code and the same goes for google android code that's
all over our phones because "They" are years ahead of where we think they are when it comes to steeling our data.

The whole concept of "air gapped" is that the machine is usually, typically, 99% of the time turned off. If the design goal is to move coins only at the 5th year and the 10th year for one day each, I think it's reasonably safe.

If the goal is to move funds every day, more careful study of the problem would be called for.

It's a really unrealistic scenario. You shouldn't be taking off your raspberry pi/airgapped laptop out of your house ever, you should only open it when there are no cameras around. If there are phones are around, there are cameras around too... and you can assume someone has recorded you entering your wallet password and so on, so why would you go out with your cold storage device.

Just keep it at home safe, use QR codes to move your pre-signed transactions into the hot node to broadcast it safely and you should be ok. If you want to go insane mode, you can buy a faraday cage tent and only turn on the computer inside.

Lead mate, you need lead because I have picked up stories (might not be true yet) that they can
re-flash some chips from a distance which from my understanding of electronics seems quite possible.

OK Mr Moderator, I am safe for the next ten seconds and like to keep you on your toes in them nazi boots
you are wearing.

I think this is the most important thing about cold storage, hardwallets, etc.
People buy hardwallets a little cheaper from third party seller, compromising security.

This is more like a proof of concept than something we can see too often in the wild.
OK, a bad linux distro can do that. Or a compromised clone of the wallet. And I expect that people that start to setup a PI has that much common sense to check this.
So I don't really see how this infection could happen, really.

However, I see it as a fun-to-watch experiment. Thanks for sharing.

As Bitcoin was booming we watched as these hardware wallets doubled in price so lets not pretend that we are
dealing with nice people here who can themselves be trusted.

God knows what Microsoft get up to when you plug these wallets into the USB ports and the same is also true
with Intel Chips and I think you are safer trusting something made in China than anything made in the USA.

We still don't have the right formula but maybe something using optical none electrical crystal lenses that you
wear as glasses is going to be the way to go.

That those third party resellers can not be trusted is exactly the point that bitmover is making though.

If you refer to SatoshiLabs and Ledger themselves -- SatoshiLabs never increased the Trezor price, except for priority shipping. Ledger did increase their price, but not even close to doubling it.

Keep in mind that both those companies are rather small operations, so production bottlenecks are indeed a thing and not just a way to artificially manipulate supply and demand.



Doesn't matter. Hardware wallets are built to work securely even on compromised computer systems, regardless of whether it's been compromised by malware or out-of-the-box. That applies to both the computer's software and hardware.



Light-based quantum encrypted transmission channels have existed for a long time and have been cracked as far back as 2010:
https://www.nature.com/news/2010/100829/full/news.2010.436.html

I'm not sure how this relates to the current discussion though.

Curious how people went off the deep end with regards to the Hardware Wallet "Proof of Concept" exploits... that also REQUIRE physical access to the device... and yet this "proof of concept" receives the following:

NOTE: quote "owners" removed on purpose... not trying to start arguments here!

Much like the recent Ledger exploit... that wasn't some "script kiddie" downloadable rootkit... it required some serious know how.


Why? Shouldn't anyone using a cold storage device take appropriate precautions? ???


So an "Evil maid" is realistic for hardware wallets... but not cold storage airgapped machines? ???


Exactly... just like the Ledger wallet exploit was... And if you think people who setup a Pi are going to check every line of code in the distro that they download... you're the world's greatest optimist! :P


Not claiming that hardware wallets are better (or worse) than air gapped machine... My point is just that, as always... claims of "safe and secure" ALWAYS need to be taken with a grain of salt... NOTHING is 100% secure... and nothing should be treated as such.

Great topic. It must be such a source of tension for people who have hundreds of BTC and other crypto. So many attack vectors and new are being researched everyday.
Even if you ensure that your air-gapped hardware has no malware , there is the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerability! While a software patch suffices for Meltdown, Spectre needs a hardware fix it seems (https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/15/17123610/intel-new-processors-protection-spectre-vulnerability). So Goodbye old processors!!
Looks like the only secure way is to write down private keys and store separate parts of them in fireproof, blast proof steel cube. You could always leave crytpic clues for your grandson/daughter (National Treasure) if you are worried about succession. It is interesting that cryptocurrency wave has provided renewed motivation to academic work on such attacks. Wonder how far along SHA-256 attacks are?

PoC exploits should always be taken seriously, despite being PoC only. Apart from that I fully agree with you. The PoC in question doesn't even affect hardware wallets to begin with. It just shows that if you have full access to an unsecured hardware device and its software you can do amazing things with it.

As an attack it is thwarted by applying best practices in terms of security. Which is why these best practices exist to begin with.



Or, you know... buying a hardware wallet.

I have never seen conclusive proof of someone being censored because of their opinions here. Franky1 for instance has been talking about how awesome big blocks are for years and he is a Legendary member.

Anway to go back on topic: The reason an airgapped computer defeats a hardware wallet is that you can avoid using the USB to access the wallet. The wallet is always inside the airgapped computer, and you use a QR code to move the pre-signed transaction from the air gapped computer which has no access to internet in anyway, to an online node. So this way you avoid the USB vector attack. I don't see how trusting a third party device is better than that.

QR-Codes are like a red flag to a bull and says "Read me, i am a password" to the O/S

Your not selling any old 286/486 machines are you running NT 4 with a 10baseT network card are you because I think we need to
go back to them days to own one of these things they use to call a "personal computer"

CD-Rom, no updates, just service pack II, lovely days.

The idea of using QR codes is that you don't connect any device to the offline computer. So you put the hash of the pre signed transaction in the hot node avoiding devides.. this is better than nothing and way safer than transporting raw transactions with an USB, and im not going to burn a CD just to carry basically some lines of text, which I will dump in a text editor and analyze before entering it in the clients just in case the QR is modified somehow during the process which is just insane paranoid mode.

And yes computers haven't been safe for ages but pre 2008 computers with libreboot seem to be as good as it gets for freedom these days it seems, older ones are just unusable.


There's plenty of people claiming mining is centralized, I don't see the problem which such clam. As long as you aren't spamming the forum the posts will remain, at least in my experience. I mean even Core devs which are admins in this forum claim mining is centralized (Luke-jr for instance).

'the sound of hard drives', woah.

attack vectors are only going to become more clever. the incentives get more compelling by the year.

as for my airgapped computer, i took out all connectivity like the wifi card and bluetooth stuff and put a brand new hard drive in it. it's never been anywhere near the internet and never will. of course the OS came from the internet but it can't talk to it.

i sleep well enough at night. if ninjas come around and scan me while i sleep then so be it.

as for the skeptics, sometimes these things start off at the height being theoretical, then the refinements start to arrive...

I think at some point it becomes unhealthy to worry about such far fetched situations and you may end up making a bigger mistake due high levels of stress in the process.

If you are worried about someone building patterns from the HDD noise... an SSD makes no noise that I know off since it has no moving parts.

And again if you are worried about airwave signals you can buy one of these:

https://hollandshielding.com/content/Faraday-tents/Faraday-tent-pyramid-shape-mounting-rope.png

Then only open your computer inside the sealed tent.

That's why I stopped using my Trezor and Nano S hardware wallets more than a month ago. I know for most people there isn't much to worry about, and the manufacturers come up with fixes in a quick fashion, but it's just too repetitive for me to feel good about these hardware wallets. I'm back using the less convenient paper wallets as cold storage option, but I don't mind losing convenience when I get more security for it in return. Usually people easily ignore things like exchange hacks and other situations having ended in coin loss, but they fortunately do pay close attention to their hard ware wallets, which is quite interesting.

yep. life is indeed too short and there will always be new scares out there.

but maybe absolute guaranteed safety will always be slightly beyond reach. it does make me wonder about how stuff like that affects the perception of crypto for newcomers.

the hacks of legit services have usually been through some crazily obvious old chestnuts like an employee opening an email attachment. one day it might happen through one of these super techie methods at which point faith might crumble a little.

But this is ridiculous.

SO WHAT? That's information you want to be transferred.

This discussion is falling into the logical error of the "Irrefutable Hypothesis."

I guess it kinda goes to show you that the only un-hackable piece of technology is your good old fashioned brain! Bring back the brain wallets!

Yes... "un-hackable"... that's why no-one ever lost funds from a brain wallet... ::)

https://www.deepdotweb.com/2017/06/09/bitcoin-brain-wallets-hackers-heaven/
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1073845.0
https://www.ccn.com/researchers-describe-easy-way-crack-bitcoin-wallet-passwords/
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1zti1p/17956_hacked_brainwallet_passwords/
https://securityaffairs.co/wordpress/44532/cyber-crime/103k-stolen-brain-wallets-attacks.html

That's why checksums and digital signatures were invented. Also Github let's you see all changes that were done from the last release, so you don't have to check the whole code for back-doors every time a new version is released

I think since, the eyes of hackers is on this new emerging cryptocurrency market, it is becoming increasingly difficult for them to hack from computers that are connected to the internet. Therefore, I think they are finding new ways. Before, we simply ignore that it is not possible, I think this needs more discussion and if necessary, steps need to be taken to protect ourselves. But, I guess, in general it is not easy to hack an air-gapped wallets.

Random speculation does NOT constitute realistic threats to security.

Random speculation does not support a theory of weakness against threats.