Bitcoin cold-wallet attack spreads to 4,500 addresses as losses near $89M
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Re: Bitcoin cold-wallet attack spreads to 4,500 addresses as losses near $89M
#2The bigger disaster is awaiting. hackers are now reviewing source code of everything crypto related for entropy or other misconfiguration bugs, automated with leading AI models , which will spot errors humans missed. We're talking wallets dating back to 2010 when btc was founded, and then for all the altcoins. Ppl don't realize how bad this will get when exploit detection can be done at scale with LLMs. Ai can review a codebase in minutes, which would take humans days, if ever. Coldcard is a tiny wallet service. A bigger one would have losses in excess of billions. A hacker will first find the vulnerability and then exhaust the keyspace and download the blockchain to cue up the keys and do it all at once .
Re: Bitcoin cold-wallet attack spreads to 4,500 addresses as losses near $89M
#3The bigger disaster is awaiting. hackers are now reviewing source code of everything crypto related for entropy or other misconfiguration bugs, automated with leading AI models , which will spot errors humans missed. We're talking wallets dating back to 2010 when btc was founded, and then for all the altcoins. Ppl don't realize how bad this will get when exploit detection can be done at scale with LLMs. Ai can review…
Better now than later. It would have been even better a decade ago, but here we are.
Re: Bitcoin cold-wallet attack spreads to 4,500 addresses as losses near $89M
#4the thief appears sloppy in how they stole the coins. multiple waves, linking outputs together etc.
Re: Bitcoin cold-wallet attack spreads to 4,500 addresses as losses near $89M
#5The bigger disaster is awaiting. hackers are now reviewing source code of everything crypto related for entropy or other misconfiguration bugs, automated with leading AI models , which will spot errors humans missed. We're talking wallets dating back to 2010 when btc was founded, and then for all the altcoins. Ppl don't realize how bad this will get when exploit detection can be done at scale with LLMs. Ai can review…
Better now than later. It would have been even better a decade ago, but here we are.
Will this just trigger a crypto arms race? Bigger and tougher proof of work?
Re: Bitcoin cold-wallet attack spreads to 4,500 addresses as losses near $89M
#6Re: Bitcoin cold-wallet attack spreads to 4,500 addresses as losses near $89M
#7Re: Bitcoin cold-wallet attack spreads to 4,500 addresses as losses near $89M
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
Better now than later. It would have been even better a decade ago, but here we are.
Will this just trigger a crypto arms race? Bigger and tougher proof of work?
Unlikely. The digital signatures bitcoin uses are regarded as secure, (there could be attacks if we get quantum computers.) The issue here was the software didn't put in enough randomness when generating the keys, and so it was straight forward to search the small space of keys the wallet would generate.
It's not so different if you encrypted a file with a weak password and someone guessed it—you don't need stronger encryption, you need to pick a better password.
The proof of work part of bitcoin is really for "consensus", so everyone agrees which transactions happened in which order, this attack didn't affect that part at all.
Re: Bitcoin cold-wallet attack spreads to 4,500 addresses as losses near $89M
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
Will this just trigger a crypto arms race? Bigger and tougher proof of work?
Unlikely. The digital signatures bitcoin uses are regarded as secure, (there could be attacks if we get quantum computers.) The issue here was the software didn't put in enough randomness when generating the keys, and so it was straight forward to search the small space of keys the wallet would generate. It's not so different if you encrypted a file with a weak password and someone guessed it—you don't need stronger…
The issue is they forked sane GPL code (Trezor's), then decided they wanted no one to be able to copy them in turn so they rewrote components and messed up entropy. IIRC they intended to still use the secure element to generate some but it failed open and had no meaningful tests to detect so, leading to significantly fewer bytes for years.
Tests should have caught that, and it should not have simply failed open during the most critical part of entropy generation.
Re: Bitcoin cold-wallet attack spreads to 4,500 addresses as losses near $89M
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
Will this just trigger a crypto arms race? Bigger and tougher proof of work?
Unlikely. The digital signatures bitcoin uses are regarded as secure, (there could be attacks if we get quantum computers.) The issue here was the software didn't put in enough randomness when generating the keys, and so it was straight forward to search the small space of keys the wallet would generate. It's not so different if you encrypted a file with a weak password and someone guessed it—you don't need stronger…
Claude has found some weaknesses in other schemes, but not fully breaking anything yet:
https://www.anthropic.com/research/discovering-cryptographic...