All hw wallets are being breached. Big, easy target. I think a lot of people are interested in this breach and the people behind it. 100 million worth? This might works both ways.. curious about the further investigations. My hunch… after major crackdowns on scam centers in the golden triangle, this is their latest dab to wealth?
Stable coins are spreading like wildfire in Asia. It’s poised to overtake even the US is terms of spending. People use it to send money back home and ledgers MITM attack happened in Asia.
Ledger the company was not breached (this time around). The devices here were modified by a middleman in the distribution chain and sold to unsuspecting buyers.
The crypto lunatic fringe have long frustrated me with their assertions of sovereign this and that.
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 sure what you mean? Taiwan, imported, isnt taiwan the biggest exporter of high end chips? 100% these have not been hacked in Taiwan. You mean setting up your own fab? I am confused
Yes, you're missing that grabbing an airgapped PC with a fresh debian install is less fool-proof than you are proposing. The victims here thought they were buying an airgapped device but due to a supply-chain attack they were not actually airgapped. Of course the odds of their being a secret modem in a random PC you buy to be your own homebrew ledger device are nearly 0 -- but it's certainly not impossible or even difficult for a motivated attacker -- it's just unlikely because there would usually not be enough value in snooping on a device like that. What you are talking about is just security through obscurity, not actual security.
shrug - if you want to take the government out of your money and put it into a system that can scale a lot larger than the size of your local community, then you had better know what you are doing...
That's an impractical stance, there's always another layer down.
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.
how can the implant send the seed words to an attacker? doesn't a crypto wallet have to talk an application on the host computer? wouldn't the communication between the wallet and the host computer never allow for the seed words to be sent from the wallet to the outside world? in other words how could an "implant" tampering of the wallet make the host computer suddenly start sending seed phrases to third parties?
They were almost certainly not doing the OCR on the device. Such a CPU would be too power-hungry and the process would still be too error-prone given the limited compute. They would just send the raw data to the C2, which could send it to an emulator, snapshot the output and send it to an LLM.
and only needs to distinguish around the 1000 different words that are used in the seedphrase. So it is more word-recognition than character recognition.
Streaming the raw data would also be more flexible for other use cases. From what I've read, it was streaming off the generated recovery passphrase, but users aren't required to generate one--they can input one. That'd require a much more sophisticated algorithm than simply reading from the screen, since users are using two buttons to pick from hundreds of words in a randomized menu.
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.
> "Every bitcoin in existence will eventually be hacked."
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...)
I just opened a ledger up, its stupid easy to do. Why wouldn't they make this a sealed unit with and glue it to make it impossible to open without damaging? Also why would you not glue the entire circuit board? The entire board is covered in test pads which make it super easy to solder dodgy stuff onto.
I had an old Ledger die recently and replaced it with a new one. Didn't even consider being potentially able to replace the battery, but it would have been nice.
On the plus side, I did get to do a "fire drill" of my recovery process, which did work, so that was nice.
I'm a large believer of long-living tools and things in general, so I prefer my tools to be repairable and maintainable.
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.
different models are subject to different levels of physical security. for example, the Nano Gen5 is extremely hard to open without some form of physical damage
The idea of a hardware wallet sounded wronged to me from the start.
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?
If there was ever any appeal to me, it’s that vague notion that machines get wiped, rebuilt, compromised, travel, get stolen, etc. A dedicated device could kinda avoid some of that if it mostly sits in a safe or something.
Strictly speaking, a hardware wallet doesn't hold your "money". Your assets live on the blockchain, and your seed phrase generates the private keys that control them.
The hardware wallet is just an interface between you, your seed, and the blockchain.
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)
Your general purpose computer is connected to the internet 24/7. It runs a complex operating system which constantly gets updated and patched. It visits dodgy websites, downloads npm packages, backs up files to the cloud, etc.
Yes, you can certainly use an air gapped laptop as a dedicated hardware wallet.
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?
Right, so now you need an additional device on hand (your phone) to parse the QR code into a string. Or I guess you could activate your hot laptop's webcam, pick up your cold laptop, crank the brightness up, point it towards your webcam, and capture the QR like that.
You need an additional device on hand to use the hardware wallet too, so that's not an argument against an air-gapped general purpose computer instead of a hardware wallet.
Yeah, I'm not deep into this stuff, but I thought the role of the device is to hold the key for a wallet that you don't intend to transfer out of very often. This makes the trade-off (more hassle, more security) worth it. If you are using the key all the time I don't see the point, the storage device won't be the weak point in your setup anyway.
Is it though? I can be relatively sure nobody soldered a foreign component into it; tampering with the supply chain is a lot more difficult, easily detectable, and wouldn't scale. I can use 100% open source software, in an OS where it's signed and completely safe from interference - except the NSA of course, but they are not interested in your money.
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.
Using a consumer pc, risk wouldn't come from hardware hack implementations, it would be mostly software.
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.
> fake or infected Zoom binaries, Xcode binaries, etc.
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.
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.
It's all about reducing the trusted computing base, both in terms of lines of code and of organizations supplying said code.
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.
Get a general purpose computer that you have removed all writable storage from. Boot from a CD-ROM or write protected USB drive that contains an OS, your wallet software, and your encrypted key.
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.
How do you write the CD-ROM? Who vets the software that goes on it? How sure are you that none of the many peripherals running their own firmware are compromised?
The software that goes on the CD-ROM or write-protected USB drive can simply be a minimal Debian Linux, with some popular software wallet that works on read-only systems installed.
You build it the same way people build any other read-only bootable Linux.
Configure your kernel to not include drivers for any peripherals not needed for the task of being a wallet.
If you have some peripheral whose firmware does something like snoop RAM on its own to try to find and steal your crypto keys, and it has some way to exfiltrate that data then maybe you are screwed.
But if you do this right nothing you are using is particularly associated with cryptocurrencies or cryptocurrency users, and ideally you bought all this some anonymous way (like went to Best Buy and bought an RPi with cash, along with any peripherals you need).
Note that once built you should never need to update either the hardware or the software, so unless it is already compromised when built it should stay safe.
I believe an untampered Ledger is still OK as long as you don't pair it with a compromised machine, which perhaps is not saying much at the present moment...
The security model of Ledger wallets should survive even a compromised computer/phone, assuming you have an out-of-band way to compare address destinations and hashes.
When people will understand that a "cryptowallet is a simple Aphanumeric sequence. Why would you need a hardware trick if all you have to do is scan for a match. Crypto has always been a scam, ask yourself do you know anyone of your friends that made it with crypto!
"ask yourself do you know anyone of your friends that made it with crypto!" yes. Why would you use such an easily falsifiable example? I'm sure there's plenty of other points in your preference's favor.
That said, for users who believe the math that secures everything from SSL/TLS over iMessage to PGP is a "scam", not knowing anyone who made it rich with a particular application of those algorithms is likely the least of their worries.
So where does the implanted chip upload the seed phrase to? Who owns that website? This seems like it should have been caught with wireshark or network sniffing of the Ledger app?
Looking at the images here, there is zero attempt at security here from the ledger team. They’re using an MCU (ST MCU with Cortex M4 core) that doesn’t have any meaningful security features (ie, no secure boot, no differentiation between trusted and user mode operation - features the newer Cortex M33 core supports and newer ST parts implement). So there’s no way to guarantee that the software running on this has not been tampered with.
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.
This is a great observation! I regularly end up with M33 devices I program as they make sense for reasons other than security. (E.g. an Atmosic one, and St ones like L5/U5/H5). I look at the secure flash functionality and think "This is annoying and I have no current or projected use for this."
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!
> They’re using an MCU (ST MCU with Cortex M4 core) that doesn’t have any meaningful security features (ie, no secure boot, no differentiation between trusted and user mode operation - features the newer Cortex M33 core supports and newer ST parts implement).
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).
Isn’t it all moot if you’re buying from a reseller rather than the manufacturer? Because I’m thinking your photos to compare the glitter with will be provided by the middle man anyway
not really. nor does the glitter and the photo really help. problem is they will infiltrate vendor ,or maybe your ISP or he device u take picture with, replace photo.
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 :')
Not practical when one makes any type of transaction regularly. For those who don't want to research or generally trust HW wallet manufacturers, they can easily make their own though by using an old offline device and sign the transactions there.
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.
Which ones would you suggest? I actually consider Ledger one of the more competent vendors in this space. A lot of alternatives don't even perform all key operations in secure hardware, yet loudly proclaim themselves as superior.
It's just amazing to me sometimes that people get so far with so little sense of professional responsibility. I have no particular expertise in hardware security and even I would have made put more effort in. And this company has been around since 2014! What excuse can there be?
I would start with filling the product with potting compound, which has been a standard process in tamper-proofing hardware for a long time. Keep in mind the whole value proposition of a hardware wallet is security.
> Looking at the images here, there is zero attempt at security here from the ledger team. They’re using an MCU (ST MCU with Cortex M4 core) that doesn’t have any meaningful security features (ie, no secure boot, no differentiation between trusted and user mode operation - features the newer Cortex M33 core supports and newer ST parts implement).
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.
These attacks are easily done because a lot of people assume new hardware in bubble wrap is secure and wasn’t altered. There are many stories of intelligence agencies bugging the hardware after you order it, specifically online, and no, those aren’t some tinfoil hat thinking, they are actively doing it incl Europe, so always buy your device randomly from some local store and pick it up immediately, or buy it used, better yet, if you have some electronics knowledge is checking it yourself.
The thing with eSIMs is that they are bound to an operator, which is supposed to keep record of who is using them. Law enforcement authorities should be able to get to the guys doing this...
An anonymous throwaway email address is not exactly hard to find, and payments can be anonymous too. There are resellers of prepaid cards that accept crypto payments, if the eSIM supplier doesn’t accept it already.
The lack of security on these devices is shocking as someone who has worked in the hardware security space, but I guess it shouldn't be surprising that this like everything else involving crypto is some sort of elaborate scam done by non-experts and bad actors.
What would you be doing differently? There are many hardware wallet vendors out there, and I consider Ledger to be relatively sophisticated. This attack was extremely sophisticated as well.
The attack was sophisticated, but Ledger appears to have taken almost zero precautions against hardware attacks, which made this attack simpler and cheaper to pull off. There are very few precautions that would have completely eliminated the possibility of this attack, but it would have been straightforward to make it more expensive, primarily by investing in tamper proofing and tamper evident design. There are several other comments in this thread that go into fair detail about some examples of these techniques.
I like the fancy security theatre display that the Trezor device has but turns out it initializes with a copy of the legitimate firmware then saboteurs simply overwrite the random seed generator with a predetermined seed after all the startup security checks. https://www.zetter-zeroday.com/trezor-wallets-also-compromis...
Sad to see so many people with seemingly zero background in hardware security comfortably passing expert judgement about this attack, apparently without either looking into the security model of the attacked platform (it's public and worth a read, in my view [1]) or into the sophistication of the attack itself.
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.
119 comments
[ 0.20 ms ] story [ 15.8 ms ] threadThere 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.
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.
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.
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.
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...)
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://support.ledger.com/article/4404382029329-zd)
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 an interface between you, your seed, and the blockchain.
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.
You build it the same way people build any other read-only bootable Linux.
Configure your kernel to not include drivers for any peripherals not needed for the task of being a wallet.
If you have some peripheral whose firmware does something like snoop RAM on its own to try to find and steal your crypto keys, and it has some way to exfiltrate that data then maybe you are screwed.
But if you do this right nothing you are using is particularly associated with cryptocurrencies or cryptocurrency users, and ideally you bought all this some anonymous way (like went to Best Buy and bought an RPi with cash, along with any peripherals you need).
Note that once built you should never need to update either the hardware or the software, so unless it is already compromised when built it should stay safe.
The impacted resellers would have to test the devices powered on to see if they were using cellular data.
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).
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.
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...
Ledger confirms spy chip implant behind wallet crypto thefts
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50054092
... 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'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...