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“Crypto drainer” template facilitates theft

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Re: “Crypto drainer” template facilitates theft

#181
post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple Pay doesn't run as a browser extension with a nasty habit of granting bad actors full access to drain your funds in a totally irreversible way. Does any of that fall under "user experience" for you?

The distinction between “browser extension” and “baked into Safari” didn’t seem like an important distinction for this discussion. The similarities are that in both use cases the user is presented with a request to approve or deny.

Yeah, I think the main differences are:

* Phished Apple Pay transactions can be reversed. Crypto transactions can't be reversed.

* Actors who phish Apple Pay transactions will be banned. Crypto bad actors generally can't be banned.

Re: “Crypto drainer” template facilitates theft

#182
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is the MetaMask UI so dumb that it can't say "This transacation is sending your NFT to address X. Address X has [reputation stats of some sort]. Is that what you want?"

Surely attackers could just make new wallet as soon as they are added to the blacklist? Unless making a new wallet and updating the script is difficult / expensive, a blacklist system would have pretty low benefit:cost.

Wouldn’t be a backlist but a reputation score based on the team, audits, popularity of the contract, open sourced code, etc etc

Re: “Crypto drainer” template facilitates theft

#183

Absolutely baffling that the crypto community normalized this process of connecting your wallet to a random website and letting it access all of your money. I see a lot of victim-blaming suggestions that it's the fault of the person who didn't set up a new crypto wallet for every interaction they might want to make and then transfer enough money into said wallet to cover unpredictable gas fees (while also paying gas…

>Absolutely baffling that the crypto community normalized this process of connecting your wallet to a random website and letting it access all of your money.

Is it worse than browsers+OSes allowing you to download and run a program? Or Github or npm or browser extensions? All 4 of those could steal all your crypto too if you install them.

Re: “Crypto drainer” template facilitates theft

#184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's pretty well known that individuals _do_ need protections against this while institutional investors do not. When crypto gets on the news, regular, uninformed people go and dump their life savings in to it. No matter how much you tut tut and say they should have done their research, they will still do it. And preventing people from losing their life savings on scams is good for society in general.

No. If you invest your money in something you do not understand, you deserve to lose it. I'm sorry you think that you need some authority to put their thumb on the scale and tell you what you can and can't do with your own money.

Why do you believe that victims should be punished? Wouldn't it be more compassionate to recover their losses and punish the perpetrators? Trust shouldn't be seen as a weakness. Trust powers all the best things humans can do. Trust should be rewarded, not punished.

Re: “Crypto drainer” template facilitates theft

#185
post #50

> Victim connects their wallet to “mint”. It's not clear exactly what's going on here. The word "connect" by itself implies two modes: (1) present public keys; or (2) present private keys. But the loss of property suggests it's (2). If so, then the people falling for this are hopelessly incompetent. Of course, this has been a problem from the start of Bitcoin. Users "buy" something they have no clue how to secure. Th…

CBDC’s don’t have to be crypto currency though.

Re: “Crypto drainer” template facilitates theft

#186
post #50

> Victim connects their wallet to “mint”. It's not clear exactly what's going on here. The word "connect" by itself implies two modes: (1) present public keys; or (2) present private keys. But the loss of property suggests it's (2). If so, then the people falling for this are hopelessly incompetent. Of course, this has been a problem from the start of Bitcoin. Users "buy" something they have no clue how to secure. Th…

There are two attack vectors described in the article.

1) When you "connect a wallet" what you are actually doing is signing a message from the site using your private key. They can verify it using your public key to prove you control that wallet (ie it is just a normal message signing process). This process involves your wallet (often via a browser extension) popping up a message giving you details of what you are signing and buttons to approve or reject.

Because lots of sites send a very unhelpful message that is just a big json token for people to sign, and because browser extensions are wonky leading to lots of requests to connect and reconnect and re-reconnect your wallet, people often get in the habit of not checking carefully what they are signing.

The fundamental UX problem arises because the flow for authorizing a transaction is exactly the same - you sign a transaction approval using your wallet.

Can you see the problem here? It's easy to accidentally approve a transaction which drains your assets when you think you're just approving a message to connect your wallet.

2) Secondly there is a classic phishing attack against the private key. If an attacker can pretend to be a legitimate site they can apparently sometimes persuade people to paste in their recovery phrase which is equivalent to their private key. If the attacker has the private key of course they don't need anyone else to approve the transactions which drain the wallet, they can do it themselves.

There's another attack vector I have heard about which I don't think is in the article but is more pernicious. I'm not 100% sure of all the details but it's sort of a variant of #1 with extra tabasco. It starts by sending someone a token with malicious code in some of its methods (say the 'transfer()' method which is used to send the token to another address). This code is set up to drain the wallet of the owner of the token.

So say the recipient of the token attempts to transfer the token to another wallet (or 'burn' it, which is just a transfer to a specific black hole address), they will be presented by their wallet with a normal-looking transfer approval method to authorize but unbeknownst to them (because they are approving untrusted code) they are actually authorizing the attacker to drain their wallet. The attacker can make it more likely a person will attempt to burn a token by either promising that burning will turn the token into something else (this is common in this world as a method of transforming things) or by making the content of the token really unpleasant so people want it out of their wallet (I think someone tried this with me - that is I got sent an unsolicited token with a pretty horrible animation that any sane person would want out of their wallet and it can't be burned because it is unverified code so there's no way of knowing whether the transfer method is trustworthy).

The same attack can be run using different methods and it will operate should the recipient try to list their new token on an exchange.

The remedy for this is that legitimate issuers can "verify" their code by publishing it and since the resulting bytecode checksum is the same as the checksum of the token people can be confident that they are seeing the real code. You would still need to actually check whether the code was doing anything bad to know whether it was safe to interact with such a token.

Re: “Crypto drainer” template facilitates theft

#187
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, this can be true, but regulatory capture is a problem of democracy, not of regulation powers themselves.

How is regulatory capture a problem of democracy? Surely you only need a regulator and a party to capture them? For example, what's stopping a company in China lobbying a minister for regulations that harm their competitors? The Minister may not have been elected through democratic means, but regulatory capture can still occur.

I didn't mean exclusively. I meant it's an existing problem, the distance between the regulator and the authority, which in democracy is quite distant, but in other form of government can also be quite distant.

Re: “Crypto drainer” template facilitates theft

#188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The distinction between “browser extension” and “baked into Safari” didn’t seem like an important distinction for this discussion. The similarities are that in both use cases the user is presented with a request to approve or deny.

Yeah, I think the main differences are: * Phished Apple Pay transactions can be reversed. Crypto transactions can't be reversed. * Actors who phish Apple Pay transactions will be banned. Crypto bad actors generally can't be banned.

Banned from what?

If somebody sets up a phishing website in the US with intent to steal funds, they are equally as liable whether their target is a crypto wallet or Apple Pay.

Re: “Crypto drainer” template facilitates theft

#190
post #79
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with democracy is the dunning-kruger effect more than the principle-agent problem. People think highly-complex problems are obvious and easy. They care more about big sweeping theory than they do about local technocracy. The idea that anti-intellectualism even exists is testament to this.

Gonna say something that would likely be downvoted but a functioning society does not need democracy. A governing body needs legitimacy because it's power springs from the people, but democracy and voting are not necessarily requisite. e.g. China/CCP (which isn't really communism, but definitely not democratic).

The advantage of a democracy is that it gives society a way to say "we made a bad choice". Individuals almost never can do this.

But you are right, a benevolent, enlightened dictatorship is probably the best form of government. Only two problems:

- finding a benevolent enlightened dictator

- keeping them benevolent and enlightened

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