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The $1.5B Bybit Hack

blog.trailofbits.com

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Re: The $1.5B Bybit Hack

#71

Post by qqqult »

Bayart wrote: post #20
michaelt wrote: post #2

> attackers stole approximately $1.5B from their multisig cold storage wallet. At this time, it appears the attackers compromised multiple signers’ devices, manipulated what signers saw in their wallet interface, and collected the required signatures while the signers believed they were conducting routine transactions. If hackers can get remote access and 'manipulate what signers saw in their wallet interface' that d…

Yeah, it sounds like an attack on the Metamask extension, or the browser hosting it.

not at all

Re: The $1.5B Bybit Hack

#73

Post by staplers »

toss1 wrote: post #28
idiotsecant wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crypto has reversible transactions when both parties agree to use that functionality in advance (well, the reasonably programmable ones do, anyway) It's not a bug if both parties give consent, which sounds like a wonderful way to transact, to me!

But, when you REALLY want reversibility is when the transaction is done without your consent — when stuff is stolen and you want it back. Thieves will not tend to consent to reversible transactions.

On the contrary, thieves often use chargebacks to steal from small businesses.

Re: The $1.5B Bybit Hack

#74

Post by alwa »

__turbobrew__ wrote: post #38
Mistletoe wrote: post #3

My understanding is this multisig failed because, like most security, everyone just pressed yes and didn’t communicate, investigate, or ask questions, defeating the purpose of a multisig.

Yea, how is it that multiple people signed a transaction for over a billion dollars of assets without due diligence? If you did this for non crypto there would be lawyers, bankers, etc involved in the transaction. Root certificate authorities have already solved this problem with signing rituals which take place in person in an air gapped vault on specialized hardware and multiple parties as witness.

TFA seems to suggest that the thieves modified the signers’ applications to display a routine transaction but actually sign the heist transaction.

Re: The $1.5B Bybit Hack

#75

Post by paulpauper »

michaelt wrote: post #2

> attackers stole approximately $1.5B from their multisig cold storage wallet. At this time, it appears the attackers compromised multiple signers’ devices, manipulated what signers saw in their wallet interface, and collected the required signatures while the signers believed they were conducting routine transactions. If hackers can get remote access and 'manipulate what signers saw in their wallet interface' that d…

Cold storage means the coins are stored offline. If the offline computer has malware, it is possible to tamper with the transaction data at the offline stage. Cold storage means signing the transaction offline and then broadcasting it on the online computer. if both are tampered then in theory this is possible by both computers showing erroneous data (where the offline computer tampers with the transaction by signing off to the wrong recipient but showing the correct one). This is hard to pull off as both computers need to be infected. This can be prevented by the super-paranoid by using a 3rd computer e.g. a VPS or sending small amounts.

it is possible to infect the offline computer by infecting a USB drive with stealth malware which then propagates to the offline one.

It could also be an inside job in exchange for an employee getting a kickback from N. Korea . it's not like this has not happened in the past. Imagine being a low-paid employee at an exchange and being enticed by an offer for tens of millions by North Korea to pretend to be hacked and infect one's own computers with the malware supplied by North Korea. This would be easy for an employee to do, who has access to the computers, and then pass it off as a hack.

Re: The $1.5B Bybit Hack

#76

Post by jgilias »

__turbobrew__ wrote: post #38
Mistletoe wrote: post #3

My understanding is this multisig failed because, like most security, everyone just pressed yes and didn’t communicate, investigate, or ask questions, defeating the purpose of a multisig.

Yea, how is it that multiple people signed a transaction for over a billion dollars of assets without due diligence? If you did this for non crypto there would be lawyers, bankers, etc involved in the transaction. Root certificate authorities have already solved this problem with signing rituals which take place in person in an air gapped vault on specialized hardware and multiple parties as witness.

Given that the UI they saw was compromised, they likely believed they were signing some routine 1M rebalancing transaction.

Re: The $1.5B Bybit Hack

#77

Post by wongarsu »

IanCal wrote: post #67
michaelt wrote: post #2

> attackers stole approximately $1.5B from their multisig cold storage wallet. At this time, it appears the attackers compromised multiple signers’ devices, manipulated what signers saw in their wallet interface, and collected the required signatures while the signers believed they were conducting routine transactions. If hackers can get remote access and 'manipulate what signers saw in their wallet interface' that d…

Isn't cold storage about where the keys are? You still need to be able to actually interact with a chain.

My understanding of "cold storage" was always that they keys are not accessible to the internet. That could be stored on paper, a flash drive or engraved in metal and put in a safe, or it could be in a regular digital wallet on a device never connected to the internet. If you want to do transactions, put it on an airgapped device, create the transaction, then move the transaction to an internet-connected device to broadcast the transaction.

Re: The $1.5B Bybit Hack

#78

Post by lostlogin »

jdietrich wrote: post #60
Veserv wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your logic is backwards. Factories are not designed to withstand sustained aerial bombardment because the chance of sustained aerial bombardment is small to non-existent due to effective (geopolitical) mitigations. But, if you are in a active war and being actively bombed, then you absolutely design your factories to be resistant to sustained aerial bombardment. You do not just throw your hands up in the air and say:…

>But, if you are in a active war and being actively bombed, then you absolutely design your factories to be resistant to sustained aerial bombardment. That's not really a viable strategy. It has been tried a few times - Mittelwerk and Kőbánya spring to mind - but you can't really build a self-contained factory. If your enemy can't bomb the factory, they'll bomb the roads and railways serving your factory, they'll bom…

> they'll bomb the worker housing, they'll bomb the less-sensitive factories that supply your factory with raw materials and components. You very quickly run into the diseconomies of operating under siege conditions.

All true, and German WW2 production kept increasing despite the bombing.

Re: The $1.5B Bybit Hack

#79

Post by qqqult »

zsdsystems wrote: post #51

I really do not understand why they do not separate these into multiple separate wallets

They did.

This was a multisig - meaning M out of N signatures from different signing devices were needed to sign a transaction. The attacker infected enough signer devices to go unnoticed and the signers failed to verify what they were signing on air-gapped devices

Re: The $1.5B Bybit Hack

#80

Post by jmyeet »

dan_linder wrote: post #48
idiotsecant wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is cash silly? It has the same property (non-reversibility)

> Is cash silly? No, of course not. Adjusting your comment for the situation: > Is $100.00 in cash silly? It has the same property (non-reversibility) No, not silly if that's what I am comfortable to keep on me (wallet, mattress, etc) and I'm mugged/robbed most people will recover. (Especially if you're also able to afford the inherent risk of crypto.) > Is $1,500,000,000.00 in cash silly? It has the same property (n…

I just want to piggyback off this and discuss the scale in terms of the largest most readily accessible bill, the $100 bill. The relevant parts are [1]:

- Height: 66.3mm

- Width: 156mm

- Thickness: 0.0043 inches = 0.11mm

- Weight: 1.0g

So the volume is 1138mm3. You need 15M notes so that's just over 17 cubic meters or approximately 603 cubic feet, which is a cube roughly 2.6 meters (8.5 feet) on each side, weighing in at 15 metric tons or 33,000 pounds. Put another way, that's over half the volume of a standard twenty foot shipping container (~1100 cubic feet).

But let's get it more compact. The current gold price seems to be about $2939 per Troy ounce, which is 31.1035g. You need 510,378 Troy ounces, which is actually heavier at 15.87 metric tons but way more compact. Given a density of 19.32g/cm3 that's 822,000cm3 or 0.822 cubic meters or 29 cubic feet.

Whatever the case, it's a lot less practical to steal.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_one-hundred-doll...

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