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from the And-I-would-have-gotten-away-with-it-too,-if-it-weren't-for-you-meddling-kids^H dept.
For years, executives at France-based Ledger have boasted their specialized hardware for storing cryptocurrencies is so securely designed that resellers or others in the supply chain can't tamper with the devices without it being painfully obvious to end users. The reason: "cryptographic attestation" that uses unforgeable digital signatures to ensure that only authorized code runs on the hardware wallet.
"There is absolutely no way that an attacker could replace the firmware and make it pass attestation without knowing the Ledger private key," officials said in 2015. Earlier this year, Ledger's CTO said attestation was so foolproof that it was safe to buy his company's devices on eBay.
On Tuesday, a 15-year-old from the UK proved these claims wrong. In a post published to his personal blog, Saleem Rashid demonstrated proof-of-concept code that had allowed him to backdoor the Ledger Nano S, a $100 hardware wallet that company marketers have said has sold by the millions. The stealth backdoor Rashid developed is a minuscule 300-bytes long and causes the device to generate pre-determined wallet addresses and recovery passwords known to the attacker. The attacker could then enter those passwords into a new Ledger hardware wallet to recover the private keys the old backdoored device stores for those addresses.
Oops. To be fair, he's a very clever 15 year old.
(Score: 2) by FakeBeldin on Friday March 23 2018, @01:23PM (4 children)
I've seen the claim that he is 15. I poked around a bit, but couldn't find confirmation.
I'll readily admit that I haven't looked that well into it, but still: writing style and level of explanation of the blog post do not suggest 15 years old to me.
Has anyone seen some sort of origins for the claim this chap is 15?
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 23 2018, @01:35PM
Based on your writing style, I believe you are 15. I've seen nothing else to believe otherwise.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 23 2018, @03:30PM (2 children)
He's in England. People over there acquire greater proficiency in English at earlier ages than we do across the ocean.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by FakeBeldin on Friday March 23 2018, @04:00PM (1 child)
Well, what I meant is that the whole reasoning is elegantly stated. That's what I typically find should be improved in works by students (who would be 18 to 25). So the idea that someone quite a bit younger than that is able to tackle technical issues and explain them lucidly is not something I'd accept at face value. I'd like at least some idea of where the claim comes from.
It's not on his blog or anywhere else. He's been on GitHub since 2015, i.e. when he was 12 or 13. While some projects fit well with a 12-year-old (e.g. HTML5 snake), others are somewhat advanced (extending a bootloader for embedded boards). See e.g. this commit [github.com]. That's not the kind of commit to an existing project that screams "13 year old coding here" to me. Rather something different.
I saw the claim in the media that this person would be 15. I do not know where they base this on.
It may be true. I've looked, but haven't found details. I have found accomplishments that would seem to be well beyond the level of a 15 year old (or 12 year old, for that matter).
So let's take the claim that his person is 15 with a grain of salt - at least until someone explains where it's coming from.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 23 2018, @07:45PM
Best programmer I've ever met? A guy in London back in the late '90s who was aged 14 at the time, he'd been programming assembly and C/C++ from about the age of 5 (ISTR his father was an engineer, so he grew up surrounded by computers and electronics) and was doing contract work from the age of 12. It's humbling to watch someone that age knock out in 15 minutes an elegant bit of C code which did the job more efficiently than the stuff we'd been using up to that point. A true wunderkind, with absolutely no perjorative meaning implied in the use of that word here.