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How a malicious seed generation website stole $4M
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- quickthrower2 9y agoRelevant tweet, with the unbelivable bad (but effective!) code: https://twitter.com/eukaryote314/status/953839632206020608 https://twitter.com/eukaryote314/status/953839632206020608
- Banthum 9y ago"It is a SCAM and will steal your seed!" I'm getting General Ripper vibes over here...
- quickthrower2 9y agoActually this is .co and the posted talks about the .io, so different mechanism. The .co is more blatant.
- icelancer 9y agoThat code is awesome. If it looks stupid, but it works, it's not stupid.
- im3w1l 9y agoBut they got caught.
- icelancer 9y agoPlenty of people on HN would love to get caught $4 million later.
- Quarrelsome 9y agoi dont like the idea of having to look over my shoulder for the rest of my life. Is that worth $4 million to you?
- quickthrower2 9y agoNo, plus it is not trivial to turn iota into cash.
- stef25 9y agoAbout as KISS as it could be, they just didn't hide it.
- AlexCoventry 9y agoCould someone please post the code in the tweet? Twitter's not letting me see it.
- bringtheaction 9y agoHow were multiple people able to use the same wallet? I thought IOTA didn't support address reuse. And how come people didn't notice it already had a balance?
- quickthrower2 9y agoI think previous versions of the wallet allowed address reuse (even though it is not recommended as you leak parts of your private key). The latest wallet doesn't allow you to send money to such an address.
- erdemozg 9y agoI think it's a shame how IOTA users desperately seeking ways to safely generate their wallet seeds on third party software. Souldn't it be a built-in feature?
- kylell 9y agodo anyone prosecute this kind of hacks? or just because is a token without legal status is like stealing Sheldon's gear in WOW. This kind of pre-generated seed hack is quite dangerous, a lot of mobile apps, don't have deterministic build so you can't be sure the open source version is the same as the one from apple store, and I bet Apple won't do such a thoroughly search.
- abusoufiyan 9y agoconsidering how rabidly most cryptocurrency supporters denounce the government and the banking system and wall street and evil regulations, you would think they would be livid at the idea of a government(!) prosecuting people for anything related to cryptocurrency.
- quickthrower2 9y agoYeah but then they should be livid at the idea of the government prosecuting people period.
- JustFinishedBSG 9y agoA statist is just a libertarian who had his crypto stolen :)
- josephagoss 9y agoI'm a cryptocurrency supporter but I'm not anti tax or anti government. I genuinely think that decentralized trust based systems such as blockchain have a place in our world even alongside government. With that said, I would like to believe that if caught, these types of seed hacks could be prosecuted. (If viable)
- vog 9y ago> I'm a cryptocurrency supporter but I'm not anti tax or anti government. The GNU Taler project might be interesting to you, then. It is based on design decisions that are refreshingly different from classic crypto currencies (who implement more an anarcho-capitalism mindset). Because of those design differences, I'm not sure if it should be considered a crypto currency or not. (They themselves do not.) Website: https://gnutaler.org/ https://gnutaler.org/ Presentation at SHA2017: https://taler.net/videos/sha2017taler.webm https://taler.net/videos/sha2017taler.webm
- perryh2 9y agoI have a feeling that MyEtherWallet could pull off the same thing. https://www.myetherwallet.com/ https://www.myetherwallet.com/
- Torn 9y agoGet a hardware wallet then -- the Ledger Nano S is great.
- xnzakg 9y agoThere might (in theory) be some kind of backdoor on the device, that could allow the chrome app to send the private key or seed somewhere...
- charlesdm 9y agoI think the idea is that the seed and associated private keys are stored securely on a secure element, and they cannot be transferred to your computer. Only a signed message that allows broadcasting of a signed message can. But I could be mistaken?
- josephagoss 9y agoIs this just a technical possibility or is there evidence that this could be the case?
- stef25 9y agoNo evidence afaik. Plenty of scenarios involving unknowingly buying a "pre owned" wallet, hacked firmware updates etc ...
- annabellish 9y agoYou don't even need that, there's been a bunch of fraud in hardware wallets from people simply pre-setting the seed and shipping them with a "this is your seed, don't forget it" slip. Not everyone will use that seed, but some do, and then they lose their money. Basically, unless you're 100% vigilant literally all of the time, you're in trouble. This is just one reason why we invented banks, to centralize risk and mitigation.
- thisisit 9y agoUsing the official IOTA JavaScript library, the address that should correspond to this seed is PUEBLAHRQGOTIAMJHCCXXGQPXDQJS9BDFSCDSMINAYJNSILCCISDVY99GMKAEIAICYQUXMIYTNQCJYVDX, and according to this website, that’s an empty wallet. However, other sites designed to show information about the transaction history of an address just give a 404 error (see here for an example), indicating that either I made an error decoding this address or I’m misunderstanding something about how the IOTA network works. This for me points out the issue with cryptocurrency in general. Even someone with technical prowess can't figure out how exactly things are supposed to work.
- icelancer 9y ago>> someone with technical prowess The author is a high school student who has written very basic HTML/CSS and some C projects, including one as a joke. This is not to say all HS students can't figure out how to use Bitcoin, but you might be overselling the experience/aptitude of the author in order to make a biased point against cryptocurrency.
- Vinnl 9y agoCalling their point "biased" pulls the discussion into emotional territory instead of being constructive. They might simply have assumed technical prowess.
- nl 9y agoto make a biased point against cryptocurrency They do seem to have at least some degree of technical proficiency, and their error isn't exactly obvious to me either. (I make no claims about my aptitude, only that I'm old.)
- nmca 9y agoAha, I don't care if the author is 13 or 70. The article clearly demonstrates they are much, much more technical than the average user. Crypto UX is clearly an issue. (And I'm a massive crypto fan!)
- AlexCoventry 9y ago
- jondubois 9y agoI bought some IOTA a while ago and after doing a Google search on how to generate a wallet seed, it sent me to iotaseed.io. Thankfully though I didn't feel comfortable about a third party website potentially knowing my seed (which cannot be changed later) so I searched for alternatives and found a simple Linux command to do it. That probably saved me some money. It's still surprising that it was a fraud, it looked like a legit website. It seems almost too blatant a crime given that the Github repo, IPs and the domain name of the site can probably be traced to someone.
- Aardwolf 9y agoWhat was the command? Did you have to run IOTA software from github to run it or did the command only use things like openssl etc...?
- jondubois 9y agoI can't remember the command. I think it was a native Linux command - Not related to IOTA.
- Reimersholme 9y agoMost likely Method3 mentioned here; https://helloiota.com/generate-seed.html https://helloiota.com/generate-seed.html
- zawerf 9y agoThe article linked to a fork of the deleted github repo: https://github.com/eggdroid/eggseed3/blob/8b92ec0f8b251c9fe91cd64c86803f5b1cf0e3d3/jscript/iotaseed.js#L203 https://github.com/eggdroid/eggseed3/blob/8b92ec0f8b251c9fe9... But that piece of code should've triggered red flags even if the hacker didn't add a payload to overwrite Math.seedrandom to always use the same seed. The fact that https://github.com/davidbau/seedrandom https://github.com/davidbau/seedrandom isn't cryptographically secure should've been enough to turn you away and warn other. And if you read it a bit more you'll notice that it is mostly junk code (unused variables like visitedHash, newindex). Props to the hacker for the method acting. From the commit log https://github.com/eggdroid/eggseed3/commits/master https://github.com/eggdroid/eggseed3/commits/master I would not have suspect any malicious intent and just attribute it to incompetence (which might've worked better underhanded-c-contest style instead of using an explicit backdoor).
- foodblogger 9y ago> a Service Worker is started to generate the QR code It's a Web Worker not a Service Worker. Just to be stubborn
- 0wing 9y agoIOTA has been notoriously famous for rolling their own flawed hash function which allowed researches to develop a working PoC for hash collision attacks. https://medium.com/@neha/cryptographic-vulnerabilities-in-iota-9a6a9ddc4367 https://medium.com/@neha/cryptographic-vulnerabilities-in-io... The CEO of IOTA David Sonstebo tells his users it's not his problem if they lose money using IOTA because they're too dumb to understand the design flaws: https://np.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/7gwl38/hello_guys_i_have_lost_30k_in_iota_and_i_would/dqmpcb2/ https://np.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/7gwl38/hello... Yikes. IOTA also relies on a centralized sever owned and operated by David Sonstebo which takes periodic snapshots so transactions can be rolled back if the IOTA devs ever feel the want to. https://domschiener.gitbooks.io/iota-guide/content/chapter1/current-role-of-the-coordinator.html https://domschiener.gitbooks.io/iota-guide/content/chapter1/... Further reading: Nick Johnson: Why I Find IOTA Deeply Alarming https://hackernoon.com/why-i-find-iota-deeply-alarming-934f1908194b https://hackernoon.com/why-i-find-iota-deeply-alarming-934f1... Daniel Rice: Why I Also Find IOTA Deeply Alarming https://medium.com/@thedrbits/why-i-also-find-iota-deeply-alarming-99d4f2da3282 https://medium.com/@thedrbits/why-i-also-find-iota-deeply-al... Eric Wall: IOTA Is Centralized https://medium.com/@ercwl/iota-is-centralized-6289246e7b4d https://medium.com/@ercwl/iota-is-centralized-6289246e7b4d Sidenote the founding developer of IOTA, Sergey Ivancheglo claims to have built a time machine http://come-from-beyond.com/about-me/ http://come-from-beyond.com/about-me/
- redka 9y agoHow is this relevant in _any_ way to the discussion? It's obvious what your agenda is but not apparent why your post is at the top. Your sidenote linking to http://come-from-beyond.com/about-me/ http://come-from-beyond.com/about-me/ and claiming that it's not a satirical website is comical.
- 0wing 9y agoIf you read the article you would see it's about IOTA. More importantly, IOTA never implemented seed generation into their native client software. With this being THE central function to their entire platform, one has to question the priorities and motives of the team behind this project. When coupled with the comments by the CEO, one has to ask if the negligence is so absurdly severe it's malicious?
- mcmunchkin 9y agoI was worried about this happening ages ago so I wrote my own. In case anyone is interested, I believe this is a cryptographically secure method of seed generation, but happy to have feedback from anyone who knows better: https://github.com/moustachio-belvedere/iotaseedgen/blob/master/iotaSeedGen.py https://github.com/moustachio-belvedere/iotaseedgen/blob/mas... Edit: spelling and added words
- black_puppydog 9y agoam I the only one who thinks this is neither a new kind of scam, nor in any other way surprising, and that the whole discussion here is hardly about the article but mostly people voicing their general opinions for/against iota?
- riekus 9y agoThanks for this post and clear explanation
- gwbas1c 9y agoI wish the post started with a paragraph about why someone would use this website. 1-2 sentences is all that's needed. I assume the seed is used to generate a public key for some kind of wallet? Is IOTA some kind of cryptocurrency?
- dmix 9y agohttps://www.androidauthority.com/what-is-iota-824641/ https://www.androidauthority.com/what-is-iota-824641/ The project doesn't currently come with it's own seed generator so users are left using (sometimes) shady third-party services, such as this website. The developers insist that it's not a currency intended for 'speculation between users' but rather for a particular machine-to-machine usecase, which is how they attempt to dodge lots of the criticism regarding the flaws in both the crypto and UX.