Security Researchers Break Ledger Wallets With Simple Antennae

Radio antennae are the original networking technology, and researchers presenting in Berlin Thursday showed how useful they are as hacking tools.

The hardware researchers set out to find different kinds of vulnerabilities in the most popular hardware wallets used by cryptocurrency holders, from Trezor and Leger.

Simple antennae played a critical role in the two most dramatic attacks for its part, Ledger does not find these demonstrations alarming.

"Anyone following these attacks needs to understand that both scenarios as portrayed are not practical in the real world and extremely unlikely," Nicolas Bacca, CTO at Ledger, told CoinDesk via a spokesperson.

The Ledger Nano S uses an on device function to protect users against verifying bad transactions.

If users assume their computer is compromised, the Ledger still requires the user to verify a transaction by pushing buttons on the Nano itself.

This would allow him to authenticate a transaction made by a compromised computer without physically touching the Ledger.

Obviously, this would require getting someone to buy a bad Ledger, knowing where they lived, hacking their computer and then watching them in some way to know when the Ledger is attached to the computer.

Thomas Roth demonstrated two side channel attacks, but the one against the Ledger Blue used an antennae to read the PIN of device user.

Ledger Nano S shown in a screenshot from the livestream of the Chaos Computer Club Conference in Berlin.