There is no physical tamper detection either. No tamper pads to detect case openings, no seal that gets broken when it’s opened that prevents operation. As others have mentioned, the most basic precaution would be to glue the whole thing together, which they didn’t do either.
Trusting Ledger with securing anything secret would be a very bad idea.
I ponder "What applications would I want this security stuff for?" Crypto wallets are a great example... and the crypto wallets in the wild aren't using them, as you point out!
This doesn't help any bit against the hardware implant we're discussing here.
> So there’s no way to guarantee that the software running on this has not been tampered with.
While true, I don't think it matters too much, other than the possibility of turning the device into something like a rubberducky.
> There is no physical tamper detection either. No tamper pads to detect case openings, no seal that gets broken when it’s opened that prevents operation. As others have mentioned, the most basic precaution would be to glue the whole thing together, which they didn’t do either.
Now that is the real meat. Unfortunately, for any given attack it's possible to bypass it. Tamper pads, if you know where they are, you can drill through the housing and, depending what it is, keep the button pressed by a jig, or solder wires if it's a sense trace to bridge it. The housing itself can easily be fully replicated, it's just a matter of coughing up some money for custom molds.
The only way to make something relatively tamper proof is to use injection molding over the full housing with something like glitter as part of the plastic, that will distribute randomly - and most importantly: not replicable! - across the housing, and then take high quality photographs and store them on your website together with the serial number.
That way the customer can photograph the device they have, and compare the random glitter specks with those on the website.
Tamper proofing hardware is among the hardest things there are, especially if you are up against nation-state actors like North Korea (that has been known to engage in cryptocurrency theft in the past).
You bring up a good point about bypassing physical tamper detection, but those defenses increase the cost and complexity of the attack, making them harder to succeed undetected. As it is, this attack seemed quite trivial to implement.
Maybe it increases the price quite a lot, IDK.
On the plus side, I did get to do a "fire drill" of my recovery process, which did work, so that was nice.
Of course I can't achieve what I want all the time, but being able to use a fixed-function tool till some electronic component dies inside is way more attractive for me to send the same device to recycling or trash just because a part with limited life (and shorter time w.r.t. rest of the device in general) reaches ends of its life.
https://www.thehenryford.org/collections/explore/artifact/40...
... unless they are tied to a government.
And besides, Ledger firmware can be updated to change fonts and such so it'd be long-term safer to just stream the raw data.
There is no sovereignty in crypto if YOU ARE NOT BUILDING YOUR OWN HARDWARE.
Any claims of sanctity or reliability in the software stack are rendered null and void until someone with a tunneling electron microscope has completed an audit of your chips.
THIS is why Taiwan matters so much, people: there is NO sovereignty for as long as your chips are being imported. You can trust all you want - but trust is nothing without verification. We are all serf-subjects of the wafer-producing overlords.
Ledger clearly drank the koolaid. Crypto people: invest in hardware. NOT software. Anything less is utter futility.
not your hardware, not your keys
not your chips, not your hardware
not manufactured in house, not your chips
not your designs, not manufactured by you
not designed by you personally, not your designs
ad infinitum. To be truly secure, you must first learn to survive alone in the wilderness and smelt tin
I'll just order my crucible and tongs off Alibaba.
Wait a second...
Grab the Bitcoin white paper and an airgapped PC with a fresh Debian install.
Implement the algorithm(s) in the white paper to generate yourself a private key and then a wallet address from that.
Send bitcoin to that wallet. Write down the private key and wallet address, store it somewhere safe, bury it in the garden, whatever.
No special hardware is required for any of this...
Or am I missing something?
Supply chain risk is real, and it has to be managed in realistic terms.
For me, this is the weak link in the chain for digital assets, and always has been, but the mitigation is simple: no one hardware wallet should have millions of dollars of assets on it. Split it up, and use different techniques, different vendors, with different supply chains.
You will never be completely secure against failure, the only way to protect yourself is to be able to robustly recover from failure.
I'd rather be able to say "every single government is in my hardware and they still can't touch it."
Perhaps possible with multisig, but now you're basically back to trusting banks.
Sure, loss of seed material would be catastrophic so have a backup scheme. The point isn’t that you can make it perfect, but there’s laughably risky and imperfect solutions and putting everything on a single key HW device like this is the poster child.
There might be a strict hardware audit process for cryptographic accelerators on IBM Z machines though, I'm not sure, I'm gonna ask though.
These industries are just not sexy enough for the crypto folks to want to learn from, or about.
https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/pr/date/2025/html/ecb.pr2502... https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/statistics/banknote https://www.cranecurrency.com/news-insights/85-decline-in-us...
1) We have a legal system which (not perfectly) can reverse or fix issues which arise, with crypto money, it's just gone.
2) Someone who can produce fake colourful paper will typically only be able to produce a fairly small amount and not destabilize the whole currency. In the rare occurrences where someone found a significant hack in a crypto-currency, it's just done.
Even making forgeries that can fool normal automated tests, like those done in an ATM, is incredibly hard. It's certainly possible, just way too expensive.
Why would you trust some random hardware, that has the sole purpose of holding your money, making it an obvious target, over a general purpose computer you control entirely?
The hardware wallet is just a sandboxed interface between you, your seed, and the blockchain. It requires a computer to connect to you and the internet.
In other words: as long as you have your seed phrase (and your passphrase, if you set one) on a piece of paper, you can smash your hardware wallet to bits and be fine.
(This assumes a standard single-signature wallet using the BIP-39 standard)
I never did get one, though.
Thus the attack surface is far greater.