Not mentioned in article: MediaMarkt, the German equivalent of Best Buy, was selling these compromised devices on store shelves in every city in Germany.
Any random person who can play spot-the-difference with two different pictures and is armed with a hammer could verify it in 15 minutes.
They don't even have to be technical or understand what the chips do or how the technical aspects of the compromise work, a raw visual check is all you need.
Supply chain attack?
"Can't do shit, not my problem."
If it was that easy to shed responsibility.
"We're talking here about a tiny eSIM implant and a little CPU doing OCR on the fonts appearing on the hardware wallet's screen to read the secrets during set up. So the secure element ain't tampered with."
...is accurate...it's one of the rare times I'd agree there's nothing they can do. And I was all prepared to storm in here saying "convenient excuse!"
The device should have bricked itself after someone opened it up to put hidden stuff inside. Also showing the key phrase to the user instead of keeping it secret to the secure element is a questionable decision.
Maybe these devices could ship in a tamper-detection-only mode, then detection triggered by user to be inspected by the user, then factory installed firmware wiped and reloaded if desired, have user key loaded to the firmware, and the shell sealed back up with electronic and physical detection enabled.
'You have unexpected components. You may want to have your device inspected or risking compromise of x/y/z. Should we continue or lock it down'?
Jokes aside, keystone wallets are air gapped. And not air gapped but awesome the lesser known but imo best of all, gridplus lattice1.
Heck, even a trezor, despite their mail provider being hacked, is better.
I, however, dont endorse the iPhone idea.
Just don’t buy ledger, terrible company. Many of my friends are getting endless spam because of them. The key backup is a disaster after they promised it was not possible to retrieve it. Their software stack is closed source.
This is imo the last nail in the coffin for them. They should refund all the money lost, and issue a worldwide recall.
Lots to hate about them.
Lattice for example, has strong anti-tampering features.
Then what is the best solution aside from tightly controlling the supply chain?
I'm not even sure a tampering detector would help. If this can happen, I'm fairly sure someone would figure out how to do the ocr by appending components externally.
You are right, it’s virtual impossible. You gotta trust the supplier.
It's not, you need to write it down for backup and recovery.
A few years ago, the Canon camera battery supply chain was intermingled with knock offs. The seller I bought from was exchanging for legit batteries or reimbursement when a customer made a claim.
look up german angst