Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The $1.5B Bybit Hack

blog.trailofbits.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 140 posts

Re: The $1.5B Bybit Hack

#131

Post by edf13 »

paulpauper wrote: post #75
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…

Coins are not stored offline… that isn’t how blockchains work.

Coins are on the blockchain… what it held offline is the private key giving access to move those coins

Re: The $1.5B Bybit Hack

#132

Post by michaelt »

dist-epoch wrote: post #69
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…

Stuxnet managed to infect air-gapped computers.

And the industry learned from that, and 15 years later knows better than to rely on USB sneakernet to secure its billion dollar cold wallets.

Right?

Re: The $1.5B Bybit Hack

#133

Post by wslh »

greg7mdp wrote: post #124
wslh wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The concept of strong safeties was not in place. Safeties refer to layers that go beyond common trust mechanisms. In this case, signing a transaction of that magnitude solely based on multi-signature approval was completely insufficient. There should have been additional safeguards, such as special approvals and extra verification steps, specifically designed for transactions within that amount range.

They didn't sign a transaction for 1 billion dollars. They all signed what they thought was a routine transfer, but in reality what they signed gave the hacker full control of the smart contract (the Gnosis Safe) in which the 1.4B $ of tokens were stored. The hackers, having gained control of the smart contract, proceeded to empty it of funds.

Safeties applies as well, it is not the same to have a Gnosis smart contract with 1k, 1m, or 1b. They should change the smart contract to add extra steps in these circumstances, this includes Safe itself.

Re: The $1.5B Bybit Hack

#134

Post by bsamuels »

konaraddi wrote: post #33

This post is light on the details of how the hack occurred. Given it talks about their toolkit, am I right to understand that people were tricked into downloading and running malicious software?

the exact details of the attack were still evolving when we pushed the blog post out, so we kept it to what we did know and what could be extrapolated from it

Re: The $1.5B Bybit Hack

#135

Post by FireBeyond »

darkmighty wrote: post #110
HenryBemis wrote: post #8

Taking a step back from this attack, it looks like the new crypto-reality is far far far immature security-wise & compliance-wise ("compliance to what??" you can ask me). While it is nearly impossible to steal $100mn from one of the mega-banks, those crypto bros, a bunch of failed morons (self-proven by all these hacks), manage to lose people's money. Now.. I am not defending the banking system (and its ethics/morals…

The difference is that conventional banks can roll back transactions. The normal banking system is essentially a consensus mechanism "A: I owe you this amount. A: I just transferred you this amount, ok? B: Yup, accepted, thanks." If something goes wrong, A can say "A: Woops, I made a mistake. Reverse please, here are the laws stating in this case I have the right. B: Alright, I must comply.". In cryptocurrencies, by…

> In cryptocurrencies, by design, "the code is law". And this law does not predict reversing transactions.

Unless you're one of the devs, and you just fork the chain, like Ethereum.

Re: The $1.5B Bybit Hack

#136

Post by toss1 »

staplers wrote: post #73
toss1 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure, but they don't want transactions YOU/WE can reverse...

We all want:

"Reversing for me, but not for thee"

Re: The $1.5B Bybit Hack

#137

Post by IanCal »

wongarsu wrote: post #77
IanCal wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 br…

The keys don't have to be accessible to the internet for this to work, here the attackers didn't get the keys.

You can do the transaction on an airgapped devices and manually copy it over, but that's different from just cold storage. It also may not have actually helped here.

Using something like trezor, the keys don't leave the device. It gets sent something to sign, you sign it and the result goes back. But if what you think you are sending to the device isn't what's actually being sent it depends on you catching that.

If the thing is "transfer X native tokens" then it's more obvious what the impact of that is, but it doesn't have to be that. Perhaps it's adding a signer, changing a setting, altering an address. Worse, perhaps it's making some change to a contract that allows those things, but isn't as clear what it's actually doing. Worse still if the target address is close to what you expect - perhaps you think you're shifting tokens to another storage wallet, how many of the characters of the address do you check on the device itself?

Air gapping doesn't really change any of that it just makes it a bit slower.

Re: The $1.5B Bybit Hack

#139

Post by catlikesshrimp »

greg7mdp wrote: post #122
alwa wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should it go online at all? $1.5 billion buys a lot of plane tickets to the same physical place, and how frequently do they need to be accessing the whole lump, anyway? For that matter, I know signatures are long and human-unfriendly, but isn’t it on the order of a couple hundred bytes? Surely $1.5 billion buys transcribing the putative signature request into an isolated machine in a known state, validating/inter…

What you should do is sign the transaction on an offline computer (which is booted from a linux OS on a flash drive with only the essential software), simulate the transaction to verify it does what you expect, and then save the signed transaction to a flash drive. Then you can submit your transaction on a connected computer with confidence that you didn't sign your tokens away to someone else.

But flashdrives can be tampered with. What about a live cd / dvd / bluray? You would need to compromise the BIOS / UEFI to affect the OS.

(No, I won't suggest carrying the BIOS chip around)

Re: The $1.5B Bybit Hack

#140

Post by jongjong »

celticninja wrote: post #113
jongjong wrote: post #72

Wild to think that North Korea could assign whole teams of people working 24/7 to trick just one person into clicking a couple of buttons.

Not one person. The multi in mukti-sig means multiple.

Sure some of the process they use can be reused but the actual social engineering aspect must be tailored to the individual.
Post reply on HN