![]() ![]() This Hierarchical Deterministic scheme is pretty much ubiquitous today, considering how easy it makes it for users to create a backup of an infinity of keys and its portability (despite BIP 39 being “unanimously discouraged for implementation”). This mnemonic encodes 16 to 32 bytes of entropy, according to the BIP 39 standard – the quality of this entropy is critical, since it’ll be the seed of all keys used by your wallet on all chains, following a deterministic derivation process defined by the BIP 32 and BIP 44 standards. You’re probably already familiar with your mnemonic, the 12 to 24 english words that allow you to backup your wallet (if not, you can check Ledger Academy article on this very topic). For an observer of a sequence, it must be impossible to have any information on the next part of the sequence to be generated.Īs these properties are incredibly difficult to achieve, the cryptocurrency space tries to avoid relying on randomness as much as possible – but we still need it at one stage: when we create a new wallet. For good randomness, we need uniform distribution of bits and bytes (and even all chunks size), and unpredictability. ![]() Moreover, it’s tough to demonstrate that random numbers are correct, and a bad but not terminally flawed random number generator can easily fool the observer. So, generally speaking it’s hard to generate randomness. As scientists, we like reproducibility and being able to explain phenomena with cause-and-effect principles. How wallets are createdĮntropy generation is tricky. But let’s start with recalling the basics. Below are details of the vulnerability, how the Ledger Donjon discovered it, its impact over time, an estimation of the vulnerable assets, and how Trust Wallet responded to fix it. By knowing the address of an account, it is possible to immediately compute its private key, then access all its funds. The Ledger Donjon has recently discovered a critical vulnerability in this browser extension, allowing an attacker to steal all the assets of any wallet created with this extension, without any user interaction. It allows access to digital assets on several blockchains directly from the browser, and is a long-awaited addition to the existing iOS and Android apps. On November 14th 2022, Trust Wallet, a widely used software wallet, announced the release of its browser extension. – Fortunately, the Ledger Donjon discovered the vulnerability very quickly and likely avoided one of the biggest hack in the crypto ecosystem. We have created a file containing all possible seeds. – Seed generation of Trust Wallet was flawed, the total entropy was only 32 bits. ![]()
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