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Funds of every Trust Wallet browser extension could have been stolen

blog.ledger.com

41–50 of 186 posts

Re: Funds of every Trust Wallet browser extension could have been stolen

#41

At some point there won't be any more suckers left. That's when crypto will really collapse.

Yeah I’m sure one day those “suckers” will decide they don’t need financial privacy and have no problem with the state reaching into their wallets at will. Then they’ll go back to happily storing their money in a bank account that can get locked for having the wrong opinion, or restricted by alleged investor protections that aren’t even opt out.

Lol.

> will decide they don’t need financial privacy

The block chain is publicly auditable. That's the opposite of privacy.

> that can get locked for having the wrong opinion

Any actual evidence of this happening?

Re: Funds of every Trust Wallet browser extension could have been stolen

#42
post #33

At some point there won't be any more suckers left. That's when crypto will really collapse.

That kind of argument can be applied to any value-based systems. s/crypto/ with /banks/, /religion/, /houses/. The real question is how big the risk is relative to inflation, central banks collapses, bank runs and all other types of institutional risks.

Maybe you have a point with religion, but housing and banking are a necessary evil for everyone, regardless of their views on the market. I've contributed to the price of housing by virtue of existing and bidding it up in my city. That doesn't mean I'm buying a house to make money.

Re: Funds of every Trust Wallet browser extension could have been stolen

#43

This is the fundamental issue with the supposed "trustlessness" of crypto. Unless you are interacting directly with the protocol layer (which is like 0.0001% of users), you actually have to trust a lot of people and software. And the whole system has been built on anonymity because it is "trustless," so it can never work in its present form. Sure, there is someone, or multiple people, at Wells Fargo who can move your…

Yeah, in fact for me the trust in a banking system (or anything else that keeps my money) is not in being in control, but in knowing that if things go wrong (regardless of whether it's someone else's fault or my own) I can complain and have a more or less realistic expectation to get my money back. For example, my main credit card was used fraudulently a couple of times, through no fault of my own (AFAIK), but the bank rolled back the charges, cancelled the card and issued a new one. This makes me trust using the card.

In the last few years, at least in my country, many banks seem to be transitioning from "patchy security, but take responsibility" to "better security, but blame the client". I.e., they add lots of mandatory over-the-top 2FA, etc. but if a client complains of a transfer they didn't make, surely it's the client's fault, because security is really good. This makes me trust such banks much less. Firstly, because even being a tech-savvy user that doesn't typically fall for scams, etc., nobody is perfect and I don't think anyone is 100% free of making a security blunder in a moment of being sleep deprived, ill, drunk, etc. And secondly, because what if they get hacked somehow and they make me responsible? No, I very much prefer worse security but listening to clients.

Similarly, in crypto, "your keys, your coins" doesn't give me trust. What if I lose my keys somehow? In the bank, they know who I am, as long as I have a means of ID I can get my money. And as you mention, even if the bank fails, the government has my back.

For all these reasons, while I do hold some crypto, I'd never keep a significant portion of my assets in that form.

Re: Funds of every Trust Wallet browser extension could have been stolen

#44
post #18

I was writing about this exact problem of bad RNGs in web cryptocurrency wallets a ~decade ago. It is profoundly depressing that so little has changed: https://medium.com/mike-hearn/type-safety-and-rngs-40e3ec71a... Browsers have a number of problems that make it difficult to build wallets, but I’m not going to try and convince you to stop making them here. Suffice it to say there are alternatives for writing cross p…

This is very interesting and I agree about all the upsides of desktop apps. However, in web3, people’s blockchain credentials could be used to interact with many different websites. This seems hard to reproduce with desktop-based apps, right?

Browser makers don't seem to really want people interacting with non-web stuff from the web, or extending web capabilities with desktop apps, as that reduces your dependence on them. Still, there are some ways to do it. Firstly, the much more common need is to log in to SSO services, not act as an auth provider. OAuth is kind of messy but can be done and Conveyor makes it easy to register URL handlers, there's a demo of how to package the GitHub Desktop electron app here [1] which uses "Sign in with GitHub". One feature we've considered adding is doing "Sign in with ..." for you, so you don't need to use OAuth libs, your app starts and there's a logged in token in an env var already.

To extend the web from a desktop app there are a few ways to do it. Chrome extensions offer native messaging [2]. By pairing a desktop app with an extension you can have the minimal logic needed in the extension to bridge between your app and the page. But you have to get the user to install the extension manually, as Chrome will try to block apps doing it for you.

Another way for credentials specifically is to use SSL client certificates. They were designed specifically to let you log in to services with cryptographic keys. There's a discussion of the extinct tag running elsewhere on HN right now. The app can generate a client certificate, get it signed by some authority, and install it into the user's key store. Now browsers should use it automatically when challenged by a server (except maybe Firefox?). You have to pay attention to how it's used to avoid bad browser UX, e.g. you'd have to use an XMLHttpRequest to ensure you control error handling if the cert is missing. But this is one way to make phishing harder, for example (there is no password for the user to type in).

Another way is to use loopback connections, but that's not ideal.

Ultimately, yes, the web is controlled by the Chrome team and they want you to only write Chrome apps. If you name your project "web3" you have to accept that it's kind of meaningless because you're not Chrome so your views and ideas don't matter, in the end. That's why it never made sense to me and I didn't work on it. In the early days it made a bit more sense because the Ethereum guys tried to make a custom browser called Mist using Electron, but they gave up and did a talk/blog post on why they burned out on it [3].

In the end I concluded the web just isn't a good proving ground for experimental or new ideas.

[1] https://hydraulic.software/blog/8-packaging-electron-apps.ht...

[2] https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/mv3/nativeMessa...

[3] https://avsa.medium.com/sunsetting-mist-da21c8e943d2

Re: Funds of every Trust Wallet browser extension could have been stolen

#45

Why is in something so new (WASM), a such bad random generator?

Because if you read the article, you would have been informed that through WASM they did not have access to existing PRNG (e.g. /dev/urandom), and had to roll a mersenne twister. Which should not be used. It is about implementation, not about WASM

Yes, that's my point. WASM is new. So why does it not just have strong cryptographic functions from the very beginning? Strong random generators are super important today. Why don't they just demand strong crypto functions in every implementation? I mean, this calls just for endless troubles, if you don't can trust a random generator in WASM (depending on the implementation).

Re: Funds of every Trust Wallet browser extension could have been stolen

#46

  > Creating good randomness is a daunting task - Ledger devices rely on dedicated silicon logic in our certified smartcard chips that have been the gold standard of secure industries for the past 40 years to guarantee high quality randomness and tamper resistance.
Which is worthless and entirely irrelevant when they keep leaking their customers' personal and purchase data (which they claimed not to collect or keep, and even failed to delete after the first leak) time and again.

https://web.archive.org/web/20221030030843/https://cointeleg...

https://web.archive.org/web/20220901153130/https://www.coind...

https://old.reddit.com/r/ledgerwalletleak/comments/ki1nsz/re...

https://old.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/rts1w2/got_...

https://twitter.com/yeolddoc/status/1353139243548364805

Re: Funds of every Trust Wallet browser extension could have been stolen

#48
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I’m sure one day those “suckers” will decide they don’t need financial privacy and have no problem with the state reaching into their wallets at will. Then they’ll go back to happily storing their money in a bank account that can get locked for having the wrong opinion, or restricted by alleged investor protections that aren’t even opt out.

Financial privacy on a completely open and visible block chain, that makes transaction analysis incredibly easy, that has resulted in the FBI etc. consistently being able to "de-anonymise" users? That's a really weird definition of "privacy". Crypto currency makes it easier for them, not harder. They don't even have to go to the effort of getting warrants because you're literally giving them your data saying "Track m…

The IRS says otherwise.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kellyphillipserb/2020/09/14/irs...

Re: Funds of every Trust Wallet browser extension could have been stolen

#49
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I’m sure one day those “suckers” will decide they don’t need financial privacy and have no problem with the state reaching into their wallets at will. Then they’ll go back to happily storing their money in a bank account that can get locked for having the wrong opinion, or restricted by alleged investor protections that aren’t even opt out.

Lol. > will decide they don’t need financial privacy The block chain is publicly auditable. That's the opposite of privacy. > that can get locked for having the wrong opinion Any actual evidence of this happening?

Canadian government did it last year.

Re: Funds of every Trust Wallet browser extension could have been stolen

#50
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Money is fundamentally community based. It is based on exchange with your neighbors and colleagues and peers and anyone you do business with. You’re not getting away from the entity representing that community from exerting some control over it. Precious materials like gold are probably the best you can get as the material itself has some value.

Why do precious metals have value?

A metal such as gold has both intrinsic and extrinsic value from the time of antiquity to modern day.

For one, gold, enables the electronic device you used to post your comment.

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