‘I forgot my PIN’: An epic tale of losing $30,000 in bitcoin

https://www.wired.com/story/i-forgot-my-pin-an-epic-tale-of-losing-dollar30000-in-bitcoin/?mbid=synd_digg

by scotty79 • 9 years ago

108 41 9 years ago

wired.com

pwinnski• 9 years ago

How do you misspell 'losing' when quoting a title in which it is spelled correctly?

Confiks• 9 years ago

Probably by tapping the 'o' key one time too many.

scotty79• 9 years ago

I manually changed it to lowercase since after I copied it, it was all caps. I was posting from my phone (hard to edit things there) in between talking to my mom about unrelated things.

Scoundreller6• 9 years ago

when the Trezor is powered on, its firmware (basically, the Trezor’s operating system) copies its PIN and 24 seed words into the Trezor’s SRAM [...] in an unencrypted form.
If you do what is called a “soft reset” on the device—accomplished by delicately shorting two pins on its printed circuit board—you can then install the exploit firmware without wiping the SRAM’s memory. This allows you to see your PIN and seed numbers.

There's the primary vulnerability.

I fear there are other vulnerabilities that could defeat the anti-PIN cracking delays...

Old-school pay-tv hackers (Chris Tarnovsky anyone?) would probably have a field-day with micro-probers and more invasive recovery techniques on these hardware wallets. At $100 and in small volumes (plus the cost of flashy UIs and marketing), who knows how secure the silicon is.

The more I think about it, the more I think PIN-enabled wallets are the wrong way to go for long-term storage. Print your recovery words, store them appropriately (not all with one person and/or in one place, etc.) and then crush the generation device. Hopefully its random numbers can't be predicted.

solotronics2• 9 years ago

Treat the hardware wallet as securely as the seed words. The advantage is being able to sign and spend from the addresses on the hardware wallet without exposing to an untrusted computer each time you spend.

Scoundreller6• 9 years ago

You're assuming the hardware wallet to be a trusted computer...

solotronics2• 9 years ago

serious question. is a handful of 16 sided dice a safe generation method?

Scoundreller6• 9 years ago

Nothing is perfect, but I'd trust it after doing a small trial, and maybe my own conversion mapping (e.g. 1=16, 2=14, 3=15, etc.) just to satisfy some amount of paranoia.

rasz• 9 years ago

I cant be bothered to check the vendor of Arm M3 this dongle uses, but most cheap non hardened microcontrollers are trivial to bypass read protection

for example budget M0 STM32F0 ttps://www.aisec.fraunhofer.de/en/FirmwareProtection.html

benmcnelly• 9 years ago

I don't read wired, so not sure if my story is similar, but I have a damage hard drive with 30+ coins on it. It may be worth trying a little harder to restore it...

vernie• 9 years ago

I don't read Wired either, so not sure if my story is similar, but I think I'm out of clean socks so I might need to do laundry tonight.

Scoundreller6• 9 years ago

Just how is the hard drive damaged? Most of the time... the data is fine, but some board-level component died.

Lots of people out there are capable of swapping boards from the drive and swapping the chips storing any user-specific data , then enabling access to the data.

ringaroundthetx3• 9 years ago

Its just ~$180,000 worth of bitcoin

no big deal, no need to waste your time on that

Grangar• 9 years ago

You could also just mail me the drive if you get tired of it...

cannonedhamster• 9 years ago

I used to have somewhere around 100 in a wallet from the early days when bitcoin fountains were still a thing. Platters are shattered and no backups, I thought I had it backed up, but it's gone. I can't tell you how many times I've searched for a way to recover that wallet.

tptacek2• 9 years ago

What the fuck kind of cryptographic hardware security device is unlocked with a PIN and stores the plaintext of the PIN? What cryptosystem generates a recovery key and then stores the recovery key? That is a clown-car vulnerability.

Later

You know what I bet? I bet the PIN check is literally a string comparison, between the input PIN, and a stored "correct" PIN that they decrypt every time you try a PIN.

zwily3• 9 years ago

The recovery key isn’t just used for recovery - every operation is derived from the recovery key. The device has to know it, in plaintext, in order to actually do anything.

Scoundreller6• 9 years ago

Maybe he's looking for one-way encryption ;)

darkmighty• 9 years ago

The device has to know it, in plaintext, in order to actually do anything

How so? You can use pins for encryption, I believe that's what tptacek was referring to.

If you use a strong key derivation function with an efficient hardware (i.e. within a few orders of efficiency limits of current generation), while using maybe 10J of energy, will economically protect at least about $1000, or $16000 with an 8 character pin. In practice significantly more because of hardware costs for a parallel attack, and the casual cracker wouldn't be willing to spend that much on a totally uncertain reward. At moderate hardware costs it could take years to crack.

tptacek2• 9 years ago

From the Trezor MCU source code on Github, it looks like I was right, and the PIN check is literally a string comparison.

matthewaveryusa2• 9 years ago

Here I am sweating about if my hkdf and onioning different aes modes is future-proof enough. It's a good reminder that time to market is the only thing that matters.

JoachimSchipper• 9 years ago

Apparently Trezor is to a HSM what MtGox is to a bank. Given the ecosystem, I'm not really surprised...

DougN7• 9 years ago

Anyone know of a simple way to store bitcoin on paper or digital that won’t depend on a specific app being available in 10 years?

colecut• 9 years ago

write down your address and private key.

you only have access to your private key if your wallet is not on an exchange.

matthewaveryusa2• 9 years ago

choose a date that's significant for you as well as a stock ticker. lookup the closing price of that stock on that date. That's your password, and you'll probably never forget it unless you have Alzheimers.

incompatible• 9 years ago

That's a funny story. He may have got lucky: if he hadn't been locked out for so long, he may have been tempted to sell the bitcoins after the value doubled or so.

learntofly• 9 years ago

Brilliant story. Pleased both the author and "hacker" we're happy with the deal struck.

s17n4• 9 years ago

This decentralized nature of the bitcoin network is not without consequences—the main one being that if you screw up, it’s your own damn problem.

This is going to be a deal-breaker for most people. For mass adoption, you'll need bitcoins to be held by institutions that take responsibility for screwups like lost keys (ie, banks).

ringaroundthetx3• 9 years ago

There are institutions that do that with multisignature addresses. Thats been around for probably longer than you knew about bitcoin, so there goes your rebuttal.

s17n4• 9 years ago

It's not a technical problem, it's an institutional problem - really multisig is probably worse than just having the bank hold the keys, as it makes it possible for users to lose their money by doing something stupid with their key.

Karunamon• 9 years ago

This isn’t a problem with cash - why is it a problem with bitcoin?

I think this is a perception problem. BTC isn’t an online credit card, it’s online cash. With everything that implies.

s17n4• 9 years ago

It's not a "problem with bitcoin" per se, it just means that bitcoin will have to be supported by banks in the same way that cash is - your assets are kept in an account that the bank is responsible for and you only hold a small amount of cash at a time - for it to be useful to people.

davidgh• 9 years ago

Whoa that read like a Tom Clancy novel. I started reading right before we had to go somewhere so I told my wife when we got into the car (I was driving) “please read this out loud”. At the end she and my daughter were completely captivated and wrapped up in the drama.

Then from the backseat I hear my daughter say, “What’s a Bitcoin?”

llamataboot• 9 years ago

This article compelled me to go back and find old wallets that I may have left trace amount of BTC in when last I was mining in 2011 or so. So far I've found 1.09 BTC combined between them! Thanks article for compelling me to search the couch cushions for $6k!

Tomte• 9 years ago

He put the recovery code (only copy) under his daughter‘s pillow and then forgot about that? How stupid is that?

A big folder with emergency/in case of death information (including Bitcoin recovery codes, but also, oh maybe banking information, which insurance companies you‘ve used, a will, medical directives etc., would have been a better idea.

And then put it where you keep big folders and people will actually find it when they‘re looking for it while in distress.

„My father died, he has this shelve with document folders, but let‘s ignore that and search my room“ said nobody ever.

valkum• 9 years ago

That is where a thief would search too. You have the possibility to store those things at a bank for example but this leads to other problems (what is it your are on a run). Or you dig a hole in your garden only to forget the exact location. There is no distinct answer to where should I store those I think.

‘I forgot my PIN’: An epic tale of losing $30,000 in bitcoin

Related Stories