A white hat hacker hacked the Trezor One wallet and returned crypto assets worth more than $2 million – Bits Media

Computer engineer Joe Grand exploited Trezor One hardware wallet vulnerability, to return crypto assets worth more than $2 million user, to someone who has lost their PIN code.

White hat hacker Joe Grand (Joe Grand), known as "Kingpin" ("Thief in Law"), posted a video on Youtube, in whom I told, how he managed to hack the Trezor One hardware wallet. Thus, a computer engineer from Portland helped return money to New York entrepreneur Dan Reich (Dan Reich), who lost his wallet PIN.

Also in 2018 year, Reich decided to cash out about $50 000, however, I discovered, I lost my wallet PIN, where the cryptocurrency was stored. After 12 After unsuccessful attempts to guess the PIN code, he decided to postpone the withdrawal of funds until better times, to avoid automatic blocking of the wallet after 16 wrong attempts.

However, this year the price of crypto assets, stored in Reich's wallet, grew to $2 million, and he decided to take extreme measures, to get money. Without a seed phrase or PIN code, the only way to regain access to crypto assets was hacking.

Reich contacted Grand and offered to hack the wallet.. White hat hacker throughout 12 I've been trying to recover my lost PIN for weeks. During this time he made a lot of trial and error, but in the end I found a way to restore access to crypto assets. The key to hacking, oddly enough, was caused by the vulnerability of older wallet models.

Trezor One wallets temporarily moved PIN and key to RAM during update, and then put them back into flash memory. Grand discovered, what's in the version, installed on Reich's wallet, this information has not moved, and copied into RAM. It means, that in case of unsuccessful hacking and erasing the RAM, the PIN code and key will still be stored in flash memory.

After a cyber attack with error injection - method, which changes the voltage, supplied to the chip, – Grand was able to bypass the microcontroller security system, aimed at preventing hackers from reading RAM, and received a PIN code, necessary to access the wallet.

"We're basically causing the silicon chip inside the device to misbehave, to bypass the security system. In the end, I was able to bypass the security and gain access to personal information, recovery seed phrase and PIN code", – Grand explained.

Earlier, hardware wallet manufacturer Ledger reported a vulnerability, allowing you to read data from the wallet’s RAM. According to him, this vulnerability occurs only in older models and has been fixed on new devices. But until then, until changes are made to the microcontroller error injection mechanism, attacks can still pose a threat to wallet owners.

IN 2020 year, the developer of the hardware wallet BitBox02 said, that Trezor devices may be vulnerable to cryptocurrency ransom attacks. IN 2019 year, the information security division of Ledger Donjon checked hardware wallets from various manufacturers and found, that Trezor devices can be hacked in just 5 minutes.