Who Is Planting Backdoors in Ledger Crypto Wallets?
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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.
The issue is that the HSM itself has no input or output. Securely interfacing with those is not trivial.
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.
Do you know anything about their security model to pass judgement like that? They actually have a quite thorough hardware security model, outlining which components are and aren't considered critical: https://www.ledger.com/ledger-nano-x-bluetooth-security-mode...
> As it is, this attack seemed quite trivial to implement.
Have you looked at the miniature LTE board implant? It's an extremely sophisticated attack against a very sophisticated target, in my view.
u would need something that you do not have to check online which is physically given to you by a known person. who do you really know at the vendor? no one. there isnt this person.
that being said,.so it comes back to trusting someone if you are dealing with digital things, somewhere down the line. That trust can be attacked, so u need to ne aware of it and if anything dont put all your eggs in the same basket.
Say you have 10 million$. you would want to split it up in chunks the size of your acceptable loss * the chances of such loss occurring, so that whenever you lose something, its within accepted risk parameters :')
People should do better research before buying things, and - it should go without saying - especially when it's about security. Ledger has a whole list of issues, they became the most popular brand not because they're the most trustworthy but because of their marketing and focus on supporting a massive number of coins. You'd think though that security should be the number one priority for a hardware wallet brand, not convenience.
Edit: For folks down voting me, please explain. I'm genuinely curious about your perspective.
Depending on your design requirements you can also use different battery chemistries or cell constructions to minimize the need for mechanical venting.
That MCU is explicitly not assumed to be critical in their security model [1]. It handles Bluetooth and USB communication, both of which are assumed to be insecure transport layers. Securing the MCU would not have helped in this particular incident, and I can't think of a scenario in which it would be critical.
Button input and screen output, which are critical, are handled by a secure element. Unfortunately, at some point even the most hardened secure element will have to output data to be displayed on a screen; that's what was attacked here. Electronic shoulder surfing, basically.
[1] https://www.ledger.com/ledger-nano-x-bluetooth-security-mode...
https://www.thehenryford.org/collections/explore/artifact/40...
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.
Ledger's mistake here was solely assuming that fitting hardware capable of long-range (or even global, in this case) communication into the tiny footprint of their device's case was impossible. I'm not in their industry, but I'd honestly have guessed the same until this week.
[1] https://www.ledger.com/ledger-nano-x-bluetooth-security-mode...
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?
I never did get one, though.
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)
Thus the attack surface is far greater.
But now you need to generate a public key to send to someone so you can receive coins. How are you sending that key to your friend? Are you going to read character by character and manually type up the string?
It's all tradeoffs.
Sounds kinda clunky.
For example, in MacOS it would be extremely hard to "sniff the display" as in this attack, unless you take obvious steps to authorize screen access.
To continue with your example, "display sniffing" could be done by infecting trusted software or software presented as trustworthy (fake or infected Zoom binaries, Xcode binaries, etc.) or injected through open source dependencies like npm packages.
Yes, you or I might be paranoid enough to check the checksum hash to make sure the open source code matches the build. But every time, for everything?
The less connected it is, the safer. The less software it runs, the safer.
There are so many hoops to go through to pull something like that off, it's basically impossible. It would be a "the great train robbery" kind of effort. I also don't think an npm package could alter an existing app or obtain screen access otherwise, unless you're running `sudo npm install` routinely.
Some form of phishing would be way more likely to succeed, luckily you can use your own brain to protect against those attacks.
Fake zoom updates: https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/scams/2026/02/fake-zoom-me...
NPM supply chain attack targeting cryptowallets: https://www.paloaltonetworks.com/blog/cloud-security/npm-sup...
More software means more complexity means more pathways to losing.
Can you do it? Sure. I'm sure there are millions of dollars in private keys stored on internet connected laptops somewhere out there. But the best practices remain the same: as little internet as possible, as little software as possible.
Most people's computes run a lot of software, including a general-purpose OS with a huge attack surface and third-party applications, often with broad or even unconstrained access to all their files.
General purpose computers often also don't have tamper-proof secure storage; hardware wallets generally do.
To use it boot, run your wallet software, enter the decryption key for your wallet, conduct your transaction (communicating with whatever other device you are using for this the same way a hardware wallet would communicate), and turn off the wallet computer when done.
I suspect that the attackers here have been waiting for enough funds to land on compromised wallets to be worth their efforts and then withdrew everything at once, with comparably little chance to get caught.
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.
... unless they are tied to a government.
Says who? I've bought single-use eSIM profiles for data while traveling without any KYC in the past; it's actually the norm, not the exception.
Some suppliers specifically advertise that, as well as accepting cryptocurrency.
Ledger confirms spy chip implant behind wallet crypto thefts
The impacted resellers would have to test the devices powered on to see if they were using cellular 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.
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.
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 agree in general, I'm just exploring the statement).
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.
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...
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.
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.
Or the keys lost/forgotten, like Satoshi's approx 1M Bitcoin (possibly/probably). But this is a feature not a bug - according to Satoshi himself "Lost coins only make everyone else's coins worth slightly more. Think of it as a donation to everyone." (https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/posts/bitcointalk/thre...)