Hardware wallets are not a solution to self-custody.
If one would make a list of things that can go wrong, starting from the supply chain that delivers parts to the manufacturer, malicious employees at the manufacturer, mistakes the manufacturer can make, attacks on the delivery chain from the manufacturer to the user, to mistakes the user can make creating, using and storing their keys - the list would contain hundreds of points.
> Hardware wallets are not a solution to self-custody.
Nothing in this world tends to be "the solution", everything has tradeoffs.
Say you want to do self-custody, what is then the best option? "Don't do self-custody" obviously isn't the solution, as the core use case here is self-custody, so what in your opinion is a better way, than hardware wallets?
If there is nothing better today than hardware wallets, then for now, they are "one of the better solutions" for how to do self-custody, even with the current tradeoffs. But again, I'm eager to hear what the alternatives are.
From a bird's-eye perspective, 3 things are needed: Create a key, derive an address from the key, store the key.
Creating a key safely is possible with dice. You would probably create a seed phrase instead of a key directly, but for this discussion it is the same.
Deriving an address from the key is hard and I have not yet seen a good protocol on how to do it. I have read through a bunch of descriptions of how people do it and they are all weak and brittle. The most popular seems to be "I order a hardware wallet and follow the instructions that come with it". But even people who put a lot of thought into it come up with weak and brittle approaches.
I would think there is a way to do it safely. But I have never seen a description of one yet. It might involve multiple computers, multiple software implementations and a hell of a lot of work to create a multisig that is not prone to a single attack vector.
Storing the key is probably the hardest. The most popular way seems to be to store it in a drawer or a safe. So now those coins are just as safe as a piece of gold would be. Or they use a multisig and store the keys in multiple locations. Quite painful. As you have the ongoing problem of keeping those locations accessible and safe at the same time.
Yes, but the complexity of the setup (which is already way too much for any non-cypherpunk normies) is starting to get kind of ridiculous.
I am still pro crypto and fascinated by the technology but we have to admit the original cypherpunk vision was unfortunately never going to work, we're going to end up with something else
Again, "best solution we have available" for self-custody is hardware wallets, so we're back to square one.
Imagine if I tried to discuss and argue about things like this on a TypeScript submission? "No, this won't actually solve the problems of TS" I say, "What is the solution then?" someone asks me and I reply "There is no real solutions to those problems, just use Clojure, problems avoided!", completely missing the point.
> Say you want to do self-custody, what is then the best option?
A $5 USB stick with Tails on it. You can make as many clones as you want, so no need for a recovery phrase. It's not specialized hardware, so there's no incentive for anyone to look for money on it (plus it's encrypted). If you want to be extra tinfoil hat, make sure you only plug it into an air-gapped machine and copy any output (address, transaction hex etc.) onto another USB.
thats what I did. But that simply is just too complicated for the average consumer.
The reality is that normal people need to have a simpler solution they can trust. For nerds like us booting up tails and creating cold storage paper wallets is fine but definitely a solution for the general public
Hardware wallets are air-gapped. The issue here was a distributor got acquired and then snuck a chip in that could read the spi link between the microcontroller and the screen. The chip had its own cellular modem and could send the passphrase that was shown on the screen to the attackers.
Nobody said hardware wallets aren't air-gapped. They said take something normal and usual enough not to be an attractive target for bespoke crypto stealers, and then airgap that to make your wallet.
If you sell a device specifically for storing large amounts of liquid assets, that puts a huge target on that device. You are basically asking for supply chain attacks
An ordinary MacBook does not have that issue. If you are a high-value target, you can further decrease your risk profile by buying it from a random physical store, further preventing targeted attacks.
Boy that was a slog, to dig deep enough through the slop to find the technical details…
In retrospect @gigachad’s summary is worth as much as both articles combined, but for the Clauded technical source (with pictures!) that Ledger’s Claude-release refers to:
https://www.tibane.net/research/ledger-nano-x-implant
As dense as MacBooks are, it is nearly trivial to fit a spying device inside them, especially compared to small hardware wallets like Ledger Nanos. As secure as macOS is, once a device is inside the chassis, there are numerous ways to read data. USB serial is easily decodable, as are the many SPI, I2C, and other buses inside the machine.
Keyboard traffic is plain. Bluetooth access depends on where you are positioned. DVI is not hard to decode for capturing the entire screen. KVMs are so small now that one could easily be snuck in. Even though the motherboard is very compact, there is space above it and near the batteries.
by buying a mass produced generalist device (preferably from a randomly chosen vendor) and then restricting it to a specialized purpose you are effectively negating a targeted attack.
I always assumed the people buying those crypto gadgets were idiots.
also, if Apple falls to a supply chain attack like this where their laptops are backdoored crypto theft will be problem number #10.
Banks and payment providers (Visa Mastercard AMX) provide services beyond simply a store of wealth and a mechanism to transfer it.
Actually 2FA, hardware biometrics, behaviour based fraud prevention and personal confirmation of suspicious transactions. If you’re using credit they can refund fraudulent transactions, and there is the chargeback mechanism. This is probably banking system dependent, but in AUS there is a refund mechanism for mistaken/fraudulent traditional bank transactions.
BTC has effectively none of the safety net, and humans are fallible. We need the safety net. It’s the hugest barrier to adoption. Exchanges do a far better job of managing the risks than trusting your wealth to a hardware wallet.
The safety net makes you less secure against the U.S. government, but more secure against everyone else. That's the right choice for almost all users, but I still think it's at least kind of good that people have a choice.
I’m not saying they are perfect, but on aggregate they are better than hardware wallets. Legally they will be responsible if your money is lost. They are about as close as you can get to the type of legal assurances provided by a bank.
Anacdote, I have a friend who is a locksmith. I needed his services one day, gave him a call, and it turned out his day job had evolved since I last talked to him 5 years ago.
Basically, he was now just a safe cracker. He is a a locksmith, but 100% of his full time hours are cracking safes. He didn’t even carry around the stuff in his van to repin a lock. He gave me mates rates but the shop had to do it.
This man was attending multiple callouts, per day, to crack into a safe. Because of, you guessed it, human fallibility.
In a city with with millions of people, basically a hundreds of people needed a single locksmiths service because they had locked themselves out of there own “personal store of wealth”.
I’ve heard zero such examples through traditional banking, with the exception of stolen cards.
In financial systems with a basis in law, no transaction is ever final. It doesn't matter what the protocol says or what the technology is capable of, if the judge says that the transaction must be reversed, you get it reversed, even if that means delivering cash in briefcases or something like that.
In systems with a basis in technology, final means final. If the North Koreans take your money, your money is taken.
> In systems with a basis in technology, final means final. If the North Koreans take your money, your money is taken.
This seems obviously not true. If someone in New York steals your money then courts in New York can order them to give it back even if it's Bitcoin. If they don't comply then they get held in contempt until they do or the police seize their computer with the keys on it etc.
If the person who stole it is in North Korea then the courts with jurisdiction would be the ones in North Korea, which may not be to your advantage, but how is it any different from what happens after the money was transferred to a bank in North Korea? Or, for that matter, what happens if someone in North Korea has the stolen money deposited into a US account and then spends it before you get around to reversing the transaction?
The problem isn't what kind of technology you use, it's that someone can transfer stolen assets into a jurisdiction that won't help you get them back. Regardless of what payment system you use, they can get the same effect by using the stolen money to buy gold bullion or similar and have it shipped to them in their jurisdiction, and once it crosses the border they're not giving it back.
> if the judge says that the transaction must be reversed, you get it reversed, even if that means delivering cash in briefcases or something like that
So if I pay cash for something, I can get it back if a judge orders the counterparty to do so.
Why is cryptocurrency not the same? Can I not go to a court and get an order, exactly the same?
Of course I may not know the counterparty's identity or they may be in a hostile jurisdiction, but how is that different to cash that has escaped my jurisdiction?
> but then you are dealing with criminals willing to run up against those governments
Sure...? If you get scammed you probably are. My point is immutable transactions aren't unique to crypto. They're just a lot more difficult to stumble into with real finance.
I have worked for and/or audited the majority of exchanges, that mostly white-label a much smaller number of players.
I have yet to see a single one, not one, that had a system of custody that did not allow any one of hundreds of people, most not even employees, to walk away with all of the funds.
There are no standards for security that apply to crypto custodians and the mostly fail to do the bare minimums.
If you use even a top ten custodian, operate under the assumption that the funds are in multi billion dollar plaintext wallets sitting on AWS servers the whole team has ssh access to from the same laptops they "npm install" random shit to all day.
Honestly if you do not feel confident custodying crypto yourself, you should probably not own any.
And if you do feel confident, you probably shouldn't own crypto either.
Even if you are not hacked, or otherwise lose access to the funds, they are not unlikely to become worthless simply due to the system with the stable coins collapsing.
The liquidity can easily disappear, much more so than with Fiat currency or other assets linked to real economies.
You cannot protect yourself from being scammed in that way, even if you do hold on to your keys.
Good to hedge bets. The value of Fiat can go to zero at any time too. Especially when leadership is always talking about printing trillions of dollars to give every citizen checks.
That's like saying you're hedging against economic troubles by trading stock options on margin.
I mean crypto might seem like such a hedge, comparable to gold. But really it's a wealth redistribution scheme where already the current valuation depends somewhat on trusting exchanges that issue stable coins.
Reason why I consider BTC to not have sense, it makes sense only compared to cash, and when you want cash? Illegal activity or tax evasion.
A person that doesn't have anything to hide is happy to leave it's money in a bank where, under EU legislation, it's guaranteed up to 100k euros per account (so you can have multiple accounts in multiple banks so you are safe), that is no matter if the bank goes bankrupt, the money is stolen, or whatever else you will have your money back.
get a brand new, cheap laptop or machine (even a raspberry pi works) that you randomly pickup at the store (no delivery order). Install debian 13, install electrum, airgap the device, reboot and generate 1-of-2 your wallet keys.
The wipe the device, use any non-debian other linux (or BSD) to generated the 2-of-2 wallet key.
Why would you ever connect it to the internet? Air gap forever. Physically rip out the radio, only load software by CD (ideally not through a USB interface).
The existing financial system which provides protection to consumers. Crypto doesn’t solve the problem the general public assumes it does and hype has inflated its value dramatically.
MPC or multi-sig is a pretty good solution, you can require a 2/3 sign off from different custody solutions (ie. a hardware, desktop, and mobile wallet)
Passkeys don’t gate immutable financial transactions. (Pretty much everything you do in a bank’s website is reversible during the day to a few days out.)
My gut reaction is that a hardware implant would be too costly so there's no way they'd actually do that but I guess when you can steal $92M, anything is possible. They could even fab an esoteric chip and still make a profit.
PCBWay will make anything you send them for reasonable pricing. Custom boards etc are not at all hard to manufacture, and for the amount of money you can get, of course you can team up with someone. I think the most people overestimate the cost of bespoke PCB creation.
Why do you think it's too costly? It's well known that there are divisions in DPRK that are focused on generating $ through crypto hacks and compromises.
We're dealing with reasonably sophisticated state actors here in this dark forest; not script kiddies.
Cheap $5 PCB + programmable small FPGA is a very viable route too for hardware implants; but even a microcontroller / ESP32/etc will probably do.
> A technical account published by Tibane Labs described an arrangement involving a microcontroller, cellular communication hardware and connections to the screen’s internal data lines.
Cellular communications hardware seems very sophisticated and expensive compared to a simple microcontroller.
They did, in fact, appear to mass-manufacture a custom-built flat flex implant with cellular (LTE-M!), eSIM, and everything that hid right inside the Ledger, sniffing the SPI reads to the display to read the recovery phrases it pukes out and send 'em over cellular to the ringleader.
It's an EXTREMELY well built implant. I'm impressed.
Custom flex PCBs designed to line up precisely on top of an existing PCB seems to be a fairly standard technique for games console mod chips (particularly Nintendo Switch) these days.
But yeah, putting a cellular modem and eSIM on there is certainly taking it to the next level
I'm guessing the best way to go about self custody these days is to have a multi sig wallet, based on multiple hardware wallets from different vendors.
Hardware wallets have a huge target on their back. They are great for convenience, but once you are using multiple for muli-sig you can have more security with less hassle with an airgapped old laptop or a hand-stamped piece of metal you keep in a safe
Can see why hardware wallets seemed a good idea at the time but history has shown this is a terrible way to self custody. Compromised devices aside, the KYC data leaks have put people in danger too.
What a f-ing nightmare. It's stuff like this where I start to understand Apple's stance on right to repair. How do you maintain hardware security without strict provenance over every component in your phone?
Even if you have perfect provenance over every component you put in, the moment it leaves your factory to be shipped to customers, it can be tampered with.
Even if you would hand it from the factory straight to a customer that comes physically to your factory to pick it up, then you would still require some sort of ID to know that that person is in fact the customer I suppose. Which removes some of the advantages of cryptocurrencies
Ledger has had three data leak incidents: once in 2020, a software supply chain attack in 2023 and another data leak in 2026. This latest one is the fourth.
How a French (EU based) company is still in business after all of this, is an indicator of selective enforcement of EU privacy laws.
> the latest incident, which arguably isn't their fault
I'd not release them soo easily from their share of responsibility. Tamper-proof hardware is a thing, electronic funds transfer terminals for example already implement ways to detect or prevent physical intrusion into safety-relevant parts of the device. Would probably have cost a few cents in manufacturing to add countermeasures to physical modification into the Ledgers. The fact that there is not even the slightest attempt at securing the device against this kind of attacks is entirely on the manufacturer.
> How a French (EU based) company is still in business after all of this, is an indicator of selective enforcement of EU privacy laws (GDPR, etc).
Surely you can name a dozen of US companies that have been driven out of business by enforcement of EU privacy laws. But I'd be glad if you'd at least name a single one!
It would make the tampering more expensive, but not too expensive given the 100 million dollar reward, while also making inspection of the device practically impossible for users.
If you can't get to the insides without breaking it, the only devices verified to likely be safe would be unusable too, so the product would in practice be even more unsafe.
If the user first inspects it and then glue it on their own, that would work, but it wouldn't solve this problem. Evil maid attack is something else and obviously harder at scale.
a lot of things can be done. Hardware epoxy, or anti-tamper switch that auto brick Firmware. There is hardware integrity check. Check the impedance of each pin/gpio, if it's fall out of expected value, brick it.
Possibly, there is a lot of KYC involved in setting up an eSIM virtual provider but the party that ordered the eSIMs may not be in the know, and the attacker may have obfuscated their credentials or used high quality fakes.
I wonder the lengths smartphone vendors are going to prevent this kind of attack. I cannot imagine it is easy to completely validate hardware in such an elaborate supply chain. I shudder to think about the attack surface in something like a modern car.
It seems unlikely that smartphones would be targeted for such an attack because almost nobody stores large amounts of crypto on their smartphone. Those that do will likely get hacked more traditionally.
One would've thought that the display data bus would be encrypted/scrambled in such a device, or at least packaged in a way that makes this kind of attack destructive to the circuit board (chip-on-glass).
Why are these things not potted in epoxy at the factory? Not that it would entirely prevent this attack but it could make it a lot harder to execute and hide.
I bought from this very reseller in the last 90 days and I just opened my Stax with a knife to find out it was implanted. It is a very good job too, if I didn't watch the Youtube video, I would think it's part of the original Ledger hardware.
I can guarantee that if this was open-source, someone or some system would’ve picked it up. I’m still amazed that one guy picked up the XZ Utils backdoor because it slowed down after an update.
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[ 386 ms ] story [ 1066 ms ] threadIf one would make a list of things that can go wrong, starting from the supply chain that delivers parts to the manufacturer, malicious employees at the manufacturer, mistakes the manufacturer can make, attacks on the delivery chain from the manufacturer to the user, to mistakes the user can make creating, using and storing their keys - the list would contain hundreds of points.
Seriously, that's why we have banks, still.
What do you use to access your bank account online? I use my laptop, or my phone.
Nothing in this world tends to be "the solution", everything has tradeoffs.
Say you want to do self-custody, what is then the best option? "Don't do self-custody" obviously isn't the solution, as the core use case here is self-custody, so what in your opinion is a better way, than hardware wallets?
If there is nothing better today than hardware wallets, then for now, they are "one of the better solutions" for how to do self-custody, even with the current tradeoffs. But again, I'm eager to hear what the alternatives are.
From a bird's-eye perspective, 3 things are needed: Create a key, derive an address from the key, store the key.
Creating a key safely is possible with dice. You would probably create a seed phrase instead of a key directly, but for this discussion it is the same.
Deriving an address from the key is hard and I have not yet seen a good protocol on how to do it. I have read through a bunch of descriptions of how people do it and they are all weak and brittle. The most popular seems to be "I order a hardware wallet and follow the instructions that come with it". But even people who put a lot of thought into it come up with weak and brittle approaches. I would think there is a way to do it safely. But I have never seen a description of one yet. It might involve multiple computers, multiple software implementations and a hell of a lot of work to create a multisig that is not prone to a single attack vector.
Storing the key is probably the hardest. The most popular way seems to be to store it in a drawer or a safe. So now those coins are just as safe as a piece of gold would be. Or they use a multisig and store the keys in multiple locations. Quite painful. As you have the ongoing problem of keeping those locations accessible and safe at the same time.
You're feeling pretty proud of yourself, your coins are super safe.
Then it turns out the RNG in the coldcard mk2 was badly/maliciously implemented and is completely insecure. You need to move your coins right now.
You can probably see the issue
I am still pro crypto and fascinated by the technology but we have to admit the original cypherpunk vision was unfortunately never going to work, we're going to end up with something else
Again, "best solution we have available" for self-custody is hardware wallets, so we're back to square one.
Imagine if I tried to discuss and argue about things like this on a TypeScript submission? "No, this won't actually solve the problems of TS" I say, "What is the solution then?" someone asks me and I reply "There is no real solutions to those problems, just use Clojure, problems avoided!", completely missing the point.
A $5 USB stick with Tails on it. You can make as many clones as you want, so no need for a recovery phrase. It's not specialized hardware, so there's no incentive for anyone to look for money on it (plus it's encrypted). If you want to be extra tinfoil hat, make sure you only plug it into an air-gapped machine and copy any output (address, transaction hex etc.) onto another USB.
The reality is that normal people need to have a simpler solution they can trust. For nerds like us booting up tails and creating cold storage paper wallets is fine but definitely a solution for the general public
An ordinary MacBook does not have that issue. If you are a high-value target, you can further decrease your risk profile by buying it from a random physical store, further preventing targeted attacks.
In retrospect @gigachad’s summary is worth as much as both articles combined, but for the Clauded technical source (with pictures!) that Ledger’s Claude-release refers to: https://www.tibane.net/research/ledger-nano-x-implant
The ones with hidden eSIMs aren't!
Keyboard traffic is plain. Bluetooth access depends on where you are positioned. DVI is not hard to decode for capturing the entire screen. KVMs are so small now that one could easily be snuck in. Even though the motherboard is very compact, there is space above it and near the batteries.
I always assumed the people buying those crypto gadgets were idiots.
also, if Apple falls to a supply chain attack like this where their laptops are backdoored crypto theft will be problem number #10.
Actually 2FA, hardware biometrics, behaviour based fraud prevention and personal confirmation of suspicious transactions. If you’re using credit they can refund fraudulent transactions, and there is the chargeback mechanism. This is probably banking system dependent, but in AUS there is a refund mechanism for mistaken/fraudulent traditional bank transactions.
BTC has effectively none of the safety net, and humans are fallible. We need the safety net. It’s the hugest barrier to adoption. Exchanges do a far better job of managing the risks than trusting your wealth to a hardware wallet.
https://de.fi/rekt-database
Basically, he was now just a safe cracker. He is a a locksmith, but 100% of his full time hours are cracking safes. He didn’t even carry around the stuff in his van to repin a lock. He gave me mates rates but the shop had to do it.
This man was attending multiple callouts, per day, to crack into a safe. Because of, you guessed it, human fallibility.
In a city with with millions of people, basically a hundreds of people needed a single locksmiths service because they had locked themselves out of there own “personal store of wealth”.
I’ve heard zero such examples through traditional banking, with the exception of stolen cards.
In systems with a basis in technology, final means final. If the North Koreans take your money, your money is taken.
This piece from Patrick mcKenzie explains this well https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/the-900m-wire...
This seems obviously not true. If someone in New York steals your money then courts in New York can order them to give it back even if it's Bitcoin. If they don't comply then they get held in contempt until they do or the police seize their computer with the keys on it etc.
If the person who stole it is in North Korea then the courts with jurisdiction would be the ones in North Korea, which may not be to your advantage, but how is it any different from what happens after the money was transferred to a bank in North Korea? Or, for that matter, what happens if someone in North Korea has the stolen money deposited into a US account and then spends it before you get around to reversing the transaction?
The problem isn't what kind of technology you use, it's that someone can transfer stolen assets into a jurisdiction that won't help you get them back. Regardless of what payment system you use, they can get the same effect by using the stolen money to buy gold bullion or similar and have it shipped to them in their jurisdiction, and once it crosses the border they're not giving it back.
So if I pay cash for something, I can get it back if a judge orders the counterparty to do so.
Why is cryptocurrency not the same? Can I not go to a court and get an order, exactly the same?
Of course I may not know the counterparty's identity or they may be in a hostile jurisdiction, but how is that different to cash that has escaped my jurisdiction?
It's just that incidentally, "entity you do not trust outside your jurisdiction" also includes basically your average crypto peer.
If you wire your money to North Korea, forget about it for a week, and then ask a court to intervene you aren’t getting your funds back.
That’s not an incremental change in risk over a crypto transaction.
Sure...? If you get scammed you probably are. My point is immutable transactions aren't unique to crypto. They're just a lot more difficult to stumble into with real finance.
I have yet to see a single one, not one, that had a system of custody that did not allow any one of hundreds of people, most not even employees, to walk away with all of the funds.
There are no standards for security that apply to crypto custodians and the mostly fail to do the bare minimums.
If you use even a top ten custodian, operate under the assumption that the funds are in multi billion dollar plaintext wallets sitting on AWS servers the whole team has ssh access to from the same laptops they "npm install" random shit to all day.
Honestly if you do not feel confident custodying crypto yourself, you should probably not own any.
Even if you are not hacked, or otherwise lose access to the funds, they are not unlikely to become worthless simply due to the system with the stable coins collapsing.
The liquidity can easily disappear, much more so than with Fiat currency or other assets linked to real economies.
You cannot protect yourself from being scammed in that way, even if you do hold on to your keys.
I mean crypto might seem like such a hedge, comparable to gold. But really it's a wealth redistribution scheme where already the current valuation depends somewhat on trusting exchanges that issue stable coins.
A person that doesn't have anything to hide is happy to leave it's money in a bank where, under EU legislation, it's guaranteed up to 100k euros per account (so you can have multiple accounts in multiple banks so you are safe), that is no matter if the bank goes bankrupt, the money is stolen, or whatever else you will have your money back.
The wipe the device, use any non-debian other linux (or BSD) to generated the 2-of-2 wallet key.
Look back as recently as last year and hardware wallets were held up as the recommended way to do self-custody all over.
Whenever I brought up the issue of losing coins due to hacks or bugs, I was told that hardware wallets had solved this problem.
Eg. https://dangerousthings.com/products/apex-flex?Antenna=Narro...
We're dealing with reasonably sophisticated state actors here in this dark forest; not script kiddies.
Cheap $5 PCB + programmable small FPGA is a very viable route too for hardware implants; but even a microcontroller / ESP32/etc will probably do.
Cellular communications hardware seems very sophisticated and expensive compared to a simple microcontroller.
They did, in fact, appear to mass-manufacture a custom-built flat flex implant with cellular (LTE-M!), eSIM, and everything that hid right inside the Ledger, sniffing the SPI reads to the display to read the recovery phrases it pukes out and send 'em over cellular to the ringleader.
It's an EXTREMELY well built implant. I'm impressed.
But yeah, putting a cellular modem and eSIM on there is certainly taking it to the next level
You're better off just having a dedicated laptop just for crypto transactions.
Actually the only one I know is the Gnosis Safe. Talk about creating a huge risk if it would have a problem.
Even if you would hand it from the factory straight to a customer that comes physically to your factory to pick it up, then you would still require some sort of ID to know that that person is in fact the customer I suppose. Which removes some of the advantages of cryptocurrencies
This is some D grade trash writing.
How a French (EU based) company is still in business after all of this, is an indicator of selective enforcement of EU privacy laws.
I'd not release them soo easily from their share of responsibility. Tamper-proof hardware is a thing, electronic funds transfer terminals for example already implement ways to detect or prevent physical intrusion into safety-relevant parts of the device. Would probably have cost a few cents in manufacturing to add countermeasures to physical modification into the Ledgers. The fact that there is not even the slightest attempt at securing the device against this kind of attacks is entirely on the manufacturer.
> How a French (EU based) company is still in business after all of this, is an indicator of selective enforcement of EU privacy laws (GDPR, etc).
Surely you can name a dozen of US companies that have been driven out of business by enforcement of EU privacy laws. But I'd be glad if you'd at least name a single one!
If you can't get to the insides without breaking it, the only devices verified to likely be safe would be unusable too, so the product would in practice be even more unsafe.
If the user first inspects it and then glue it on their own, that would work, but it wouldn't solve this problem. Evil maid attack is something else and obviously harder at scale.
Why are theee no legal repurcussions to this?
Amateur hour all around.
Everyone at ledger has made absolute fools out of themselves.