5 ms·
Hackers have withdrawn ~4k BTC (~$320M) from the Liquid Federation wallet
https://xcancel.com/Liquid_BTC/status/2096696272447218108 https://xcancel.com/Liquid_BTC/status/2096696272447218108
- iwontberude 2mo ago[dead]
- skinfaxi 2mo agoWhy do they say it's white hat hackers?
- simonw 2mo agoPresumably to try and reduce the chance of a mass panic among their users.
- mvdtnz 2mo agoWhat do they care if there's a panic? They have "paused the sidechain". No one can act on their panic.
- cool_dude85 2mo agoWasn't this all supposed to be decentralized? How can a foundation choose to unilaterally "pause the sidechain"?
- Kranar 2mo agoBTC Liquid Network is not decentralized and does not purport to be. It's a federated sidechain, that is... it's a blockchain that runs alongside the Bitcoin blockchain (using a two-way peg that lock real BTC on the Bitcoin blockchain and issues an equivalent amount of Liquid BTC on the Liquid sidechain) but blocks can only be added to the Liquid Network sidechain by some of the handpicked members of the federation.
- esseph 2mo ago[flagged]
- thephyber 2mo agoYou are conflating the original BTC network and a lot of the other projects in the cryptocurrency / token / stable currency space. Every time there was a new token that was 80% reminded or was governed by a central company, the original cryptocurrency enthusiasts cried fowl. Most people don't read the fine print, don't read the founding white papers, and don't care about the differences between the protocols and the networks when they should.
- vkou 2mo agoI think it's more that the 'original cryptocurrency enthusiasts' tend to look the other way, because the more of these weird shitcoins/nfts/networks get minted, the more their numbers go up. It's 2026. Show of hands, who here actually uses any of this, and why?
- jeremyjh 2mo ago9 times out of 10 when an exchange or broker is "hacked" its been the operators of the exchange.
- thephyber 2mo agoYou have worded this like a fact, but this is your opinion.
- pingupongu 2mo agoIt's just another psyop to accomplish some job by bitcoiners for bitcoiners.
- tom_ 2mo agoPurported white-hat hackers. The implication is that these people are presumably describing themselves as such, but it may not actually be true.
- kennywinker 2mo agoI can imagine one’s hat changing color when faced with a pot that big…
- cyanydeez 2mo ago[flagged]
- wjnc 2mo agoThis is funny. Is this analogous to finding a wallet on the street and returning it (in my locale: and getting a finders fee), or is this analogous to taking a wallet from a drunk sleeping person (morally dubious), contacting them the day after to return the wallet, or is it just stealing per se. Where I live it's only theft if there is an intention to unlawfully take ownership of the good. As an example, forgetting to pay in a supermarket lies exactly on that boundary. Take a cart or hide a product and you won't get away. Try to pay, payment fails and you don't notice, walk away and get apprehended and you might convince the judge that you had no intention to unlawfully take ownership.
- enoint 2mo agoWell, exploits are different than sticky fingers. Those white hats could claim they raided preventatively.
- embedding-shape 2mo ago> This is funny. Is this analogous to finding a wallet on the street and returning it (in my locale: and getting a finders fee), or is this analogous to taking a wallet from a drunk sleeping person (morally dubious), contacting them the day after to return the wallet, or is it just stealing per se. Kind of in-between I'd say. You find a wallet, on a bench, next to sleeping person, and you see lots of other people eying the wallet to take for themselves. You take the wallet to prevent others from taking it essentially. Not saying these people for sure are whitehats/grayhats, who knows until the funds are returned, but that's basically how grayhatters see themselves.
- faitswulff 2mo agoThe same reason scam artists describe themselves as businessmen
- greyface- 2mo agoWhile moving the funds, the attackers left an OP_RETURN message with the text "we are whitehats. contact us on chain" https://mempool.space/tx/c103de95817b43f2df635ec6f35ff126ca26a7c6d20570c4b01866b2b3e69a19 https://mempool.space/tx/c103de95817b43f2df635ec6f35ff126ca2...
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- greyface- 2mo agoFurther on-chain communications: https://mempool.space/tx/91271efcbb5ab29abfc38ae635f0644e3ba042aad56f92d40136e1dde4742fe8 https://mempool.space/tx/91271efcbb5ab29abfc38ae635f0644e3ba... "Please contact security@blockstream.com" https://mempool.space/tx/bd81219691eb1e22475c5985d847fa888c38f1b6d2cb2b7193f54d0cfa72394c https://mempool.space/tx/bd81219691eb1e22475c5985d847fa888c3... from Blockstream, unknown PGP message https://mempool.space/tx/3a3eac4a26395b8c2563aaf1eb8b1b77798c81c7d6337f51321827a244a480aa https://mempool.space/tx/3a3eac4a26395b8c2563aaf1eb8b1b77798... from attackers, "sending most back to bc1qdlld6antmv4xug242ed83q7k4rqw50cwfns38szx4qu2f4jwaxxsuhwxxr, is that ok" https://mempool.space/tx/8a444eed65c4584f138e08ee138f61490ef73e84f71e14dac3ca66c230cf7e97 https://mempool.space/tx/8a444eed65c4584f138e08ee138f61490ef... from Blockstream, PGP-signed "Yes, thank you." https://mempool.space/tx/83825b2135dd0abac12c9dfe17f29ab81b3427e1ae864947b0bebce5e47c3c4b https://mempool.space/tx/83825b2135dd0abac12c9dfe17f29ab81b3... from attackers, "Please fix the bug first. The chain is under risk at latest commit right now. Make sure every node is patched. Then we will transfer the money back safely after confirming the fix. The detail is as follows (encrypted using https://blockstream.com/pgp.txt https://blockstream.com/pgp.txt)." with unknown PGP-encrypted payload As of writing, no response from Blockstream, and funds are still controlled by the attackers.
- Daviey 2mo agohttps://xcancel.com/Liquid_BTC/status/2096696272447218108#m https://xcancel.com/Liquid_BTC/status/2096696272447218108#m
- mitxela 2mo agoXcancel is back? When did that happen?
- embedding-shape 2mo agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49588988 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49588988 "Nitter and XCancel resume service after legal advice" 5 hours ago
- recursivecaveat 2mo agoI don't know how "relevant replies" is calculated, but the top 8 responses when I clicked were all LLM generated. Pretty dire for twitter.
- walrus01 2mo ago[flagged]
- xyst 2mo agoIt’s not "hackers". It’s an inside job, and a rug pull.
- fxwin 2mo agohow is it a rug pull? if it's an inside job, doesn't that just make it theft?
- knorker 2mo agoWhat's the difference to you between a rug pull and theft?
- bagels 2mo agoA few extra steps. Usually, the rug pull doesn't involve directly taking something that belongs to other people, but instead, selling your own thing in a dishonest way.
- antonvs 2mo agoA rug pull involves convincing someone to buy something first. Theft doesn’t have to involve any convincing. This is a pretty basic distinction. Perhaps you were thinking of “fraud”?
- s1artibartfast 2mo agoA rug pull means you hype and then sell on the open market without.
- brador 2mo agoRug pull is a trap, which can include theft. (You pull the rug and the victim in the cartoon would fall into the spikes hole).
- fxwin 2mo agoIn a rug pull, the thing you own (usually some kind of digital asset) goes down in value, leaving you with less money than you started with, whereas theft leaves you no longer possessing the asset itself.
- cypherpunks01 2mo agoSeems that an Elements rangeproof cache bug may've gotten exploited. Fix for suspicious issue was committed just last week and attackers could've monitored the public commits and exploited the bug before fix was ever pushed? Sort of self-fulfilling prophecy if true, that's a leading theory anyhow. fix: range proof cache bind to asset and scriptpubkey https://github.com/ElementsProject/elements/commit/c26d719c29 https://github.com/ElementsProject/elements/commit/c26d719c2...
- solenoid0937 2mo agolmao, PR description says: > Fixes a number of small issues picked up during LLM scans
- greyface- 2mo agoIt appears this commit actually introduced the bug the attacker exploited by adding additional flexibility for cache key confusion via scriptPubKey. https://twitter.com/mononautical/status/2096928595432374706 https://twitter.com/mononautical/status/2096928595432374706 The mechanism reminds me of this classic AWS request signature forgery bug from 2008: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=401876 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=401876
- galkk 2mo agoTime for bitcoin classic++?
- gruez 2mo agoAre you thinking of ETH? All the bitcoin classic forks are over various aspect of network rules (eg. block size or block reward), not to roll back a transaction like ETH classic.
- galkk 2mo agoYou’re right, I misremembered. Yeah, I was speaking about ETH Classic thing. Thanks for pointing that out.
- medellin 2mo agoYeah… because in 15 years bitcoin has never forked for a hack. What a brain dead comment
- georgemcbay 2mo ago$320m, not a bad haul. More than enough to buy yourself a pardon if you get caught.
- thephyber 2mo agoAnd remember that there is precedence for Trump pardoned financial criminals avoiding restitution.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- etothepii 2mo agoIs there any indications that this and the ColdCard heist could in fact be escaped distilled agents from the huggingface and similar attacks?
- the_real_cher 2mo agoNow they have 300 million dollars
- kennywinker 2mo agoThat should keep openai liquid for an extra 45min or so.
- etothepii 2mo agoNot asking whether openAI did the hack that would be insane. However, agents could buy a lot of compute with $500m bit coin.
- the_real_cher 2mo agoAI agents with 300 million could hop on task rabbit and start an army.
- TZubiri 2mo agoOne disadvantage of decentralized money, criminals gain more power. Many such cases
- lmz 2mo agoThere are always complaints on here about how Google is only paying $X for vulns. One advantage of decentralized digital money is that its bug bounties are self funding and the payout amount researcher-controlled.
- dotancohen 2mo agoThat is a natural consequence of banks and governments losing power. That power balance shifts towards the citizens... some of whom are criminals. The coin fanboys will argue that the bankers and government were criminals as well.
- thephyber 2mo agoThis is worded in a way that pretends like the banks and governments themselves aren't considered criminals by the masses.
- dotancohen 2mo agoI did mention that the coin fanboys think so. Do you invest in any coins?
- peab 2mo agoI'm not sure if there is actually any evidence of this? Criminals do very well without crypto. If you look at percent of the economy that is fraudulent, it is quite large. If you look at percentage of crypto economy that is fraudulent, it is surprisingly similar
- TZubiri 2mo agoPlenty, search for cases of ransomware for example, you will find hundreds of instances where they demand payment by cryptocurrency, at least 1B per year.
- atian 2mo ago“Inside job.”
- aizk 2mo agoI wonder how they'd ever cash out.
- killingtime74 2mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptocurrency_tumbler https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptocurrency_tumbler
- enoint 2mo agoLiquid already has confidentiality. I think the question is: how could they coerce the federated authorization to unfreeze peg-out to Bitcoin.
- nullc 2mo agoI worked at blockstream back in 2017 and developed the original cryptographic range proofs which are the ancestors some of the involved code here. However, the vulnerabilities here and the whole liquid product as it exists today postdates my involvement in the company (while I was there it was under initial development but envisioned quite differently than what they eventually did), and I haven't followed any of it closely since. But I gave this issue a quick look based on the transactions and github history. Underlying issue was related to validation caching. Signatures and proofs are expensive to validate, to improve performance and prevent certain DOS attacks their validation is cached. It's important that the key used in the cache capture everything that goes into the validation decision (though to prevent some attacks its important not too much goes into the key, or an attacker can flood with valid proof attacked to insignificantly different transactions). It appears to me that there was a longstanding vulnerability-- stemming back to the introduction of multiple-asset-support-- which could cause a consensus split/ddos. But on a lazy review I can't come up with any way of translating it into theft. I see how someone could make an invalid transaction that would be falsely accepted by nodes that have cache state from a constructed prior transaction, but the ways I can come up with results in the invalid transaction just burning assets--- not directly very useful. [Big asterisks on the non obviously exploitable here, I've only thought about it for a minute or two and I really know fairly little about assets support in Liquid-- but exploiting it would require being able to create a fake 'shadow' asset with the a generator that is the negation of a real asset.] In any case: This was recently fixed, but the "fix" introduced a hash collision vulnerability: The new fields added to the hash were not delimited. Failing to include type information like lengths in hashes is a perennial problem in cryptographic protocols. Imagine you have a protocol where you sign a {comment, command} tuple, each a string. If the protocol computes the hash by just concating the command and comment and they're variable length fields, then you could get a signature of {"boring comment containing dangerous command", "boring command"} but then present it to someone as {"boring comment containing ","dangerous command boring command"} and have the signature pass. That sort of thing. This new vulnerability has a somewhat straight forward path to exploitation and prints funds out of thin air. Based on some of the public comments about nodes rejecting the attack transaction, I'm guessing they rolled out the "fix" to the federation in advance of publishing the changes because they seem to have accepted an attack that everyone else was still rejecting. Advanced private deployment of a 'fix' might have gave them the confidence to drop the fix on github with little fanfare as it was "already fixed", but doing so painted a target on the issue that remained. Interestingly, off the shelf open weight AI like Kimi K3 immediately identify the new vulnerability without any particularly artful prompting. Makes me wonder if "safe" AI played a role in the introduction of the new, more serious, vulnerability. Interestingly, it looks like the funds are being returned: https://mempool.space/tx/3a3eac4a26395b8c2563aaf1eb8b1b77798c81c7d6337f51321827a244a480aa?showDetails=true https://mempool.space/tx/3a3eac4a26395b8c2563aaf1eb8b1b77798... I'm going to guess that anyone who actually knows more has their hands busy dealing with the return of the funds. I'm not sure if anyone has ever taken and then returned 1/3rd of a billion dollars worth of assets before.
- rgbrgb 2mo agoThere’s kind of an interesting thread here about open source, which is usually thought of as more secure because of more eyes on the code, actually being less secure because an accidental merge can be exploited instantly with LLM’s monitoring. Is there a lot more security value in obscurity than before?
- teravor 2mo agofalse security. if there aren't LLM's monitoring patches with disassembler MCPs ready, there will be soon.
- alex_duf 2mo agoMaybe there's a middle ground where the code itself is only made visible at the same time as the latest build. This shortens the exploit window
- ranger_danger 2mo agoThere are some projects that only release sources as a flat tarball at the same time as a new release, no git history/repo is available.
- harrouet 2mo ago[flagged]
- embedding-shape 2mo agoGreat, blog spam comments on HN now? Where is the "Cry that no independent regulator audited their systems and that the transactions were not reversible" coming from? Neither the Twitter thread nor the HN comments even mention anything about this, just the typical argument against yourself?
- harrouet 2mo agoI am just saying that this would not happened with a normal bank. Pure DeFi structural deficiency. But I see how polarized you are about the topic.
- embedding-shape 2mo ago> I am just saying that this would not happened with a normal bank Ok, but who were you quoting before? I too see how polarized your view seems to be, given you started this conversation with arguing against yourself for some reason.
- harrouet 2mo ago> you started this conversation with arguing against yourself How so ? Meanwhile, what you qualified as blog spam is actually proving to be written by a human spending too much time answering your rant.
- embedding-shape 2mo ago> How so ? Who said any of the parts you quoted in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49594757 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49594757? It looks like you made up all of those lines.
- pingupongu 2mo agoCrypto is a scam, lives of many people ruined, bitcoin is Epstein class owned. Get rid of it.
- MaxikCZ 2mo agoNow you've convinced me.
- pingupongu 2mo agoI know that they are a cruel protected species who wander around like victims, no one wants to touch them.
- pingupongu 2mo agoCrypto is total scam, lives of many people have been destroyed, it only works until it runs out of fools. How many forks and psyops until people realize?
- embedding-shape 2mo ago> it only works until it runs out of fools. And given the world will never run out of fools, you're actually saying cryptocurrencies will continue working forever?
- pingupongu 2mo ago[dead]
- shuwix 2mo ago[flagged]
- mhitza 2mo agoI've seen people in real life still pushing for crypto. Believe it or not they already got burned a couple of times, but somehow they think that with the next crypto they'll be at the top of the pyramid chain and able to cash out. They don't understand crypto currencies technically, nor that they are always going to be at the bottom of the pyramid no matter how many times they are burned. Some of these people with the moral integrity of "quick buck at everyone else's expense" maybe won't stop until they go bankrupt or severly in debt. Might be a self-selective environment at this point.
- pingupongu 2mo agoThey create forks to supress the real issue like adam back's island visit, they are total scams. People need to call them for what they are.
- silveradogomez9 2mo ago[flagged]
- Roenald56 2mo ago[flagged]