SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
A cryptocurrency exchange in Canada has lost control of at least $137 million of its customers' assets following the sudden death of its founder, who was the only person known to have access the the offline wallet that stored the digital coins. British Columbia-based QuadrigaCX is unable to access most or all of another $53 million because it's tied up in disputes with third parties.
The dramatic misstep was reported in a sworn affidavit that was obtained by CoinDesk. The affidavit was filed Thursday by Jennifer Robertson, widow of QuadrigaCX's sole director and officer Gerry Cotten. Robertson testified that Cotten died of Crohn's disease in India in December at the age of 30.
Following standard security practices by many holders of cryptocurrency, QuadrigaCX stored the vast majority of its cryptocurrency holdings in a "cold wallet," meaning a digital wallet that wasn't connected to the Internet. The measure is designed to prevent hacks that regularly drain hot wallets of millions of dollars (Ars has reported on three such thefts here, here, and here.)
Thursday's court filing, however, demonstrates that cold wallets are by no means a surefire way to secure digital coins. Robertson testified that Cotten stored the cold wallet on an encrypted laptop that only he could decrypt. Based on company records, she said the cold wallet stored $180 million in Canadian dollars ($137 million in US dollars), all of which is currently inaccessible to QuadrigaCX and more than 100,000 customers.
"The laptop computer from which Gerry carried out the Companies' business is encrypted, and I do not know the password or recovery key," Robertson wrote. "Despite repeated and diligent searches, I have not been able to find them written down anywhere."
The expert, she added, has already accessed Cotten's personal and work email accounts and is now trying to gain access to an encrypted email account. Cotten also used an encrypted messaging system, but the chances of successfully reading the communications appear dim because, the expert has reported, "messages would disappear from the encrypted messaging system after a short period."
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 3, Funny) by edIII on Monday February 04 2019, @09:25PM (3 children)
May I have some of what you're smoking? :)
You can't encrypt a hard drive and have unscrambled (plain-text) bits...
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Immerman on Monday February 04 2019, @10:45PM (2 children)
Sure you can -the bits on the hard drive are always unscrambled, perfectly ordinary zeros and ones*. It's only the data they're storing that can be scrambled...
*Actually often 2s,and 3s as well, and quite possibly many more. Very few modern storage media use binary-state physical data representations.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 05 2019, @03:09PM (1 child)
Pretty sure magnetic storage is still ones and zeros, SSDs I know sometimes use other states.
Unless something has changed in the last two years since I was let go from that industry.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday February 05 2019, @04:08PM
Yes SSDs mostly use 2-3 bits (4 or 8 potential charge levels) per physical storage location, but I'm fairly certain so do many modern hard drives. Not the new vertical-magnet style ones of course, but if you're storing data as a traditional horizontal magnetic alignment you can use a somewhat more sophisticated read-write head to set and detect N/S alignment as well as E/W, doubling the data density. Or go another step to an 8-point compass and you can store 3 bits per location.
Hmm, I could swear I had heard about new drives coming out that did that years ago, but Google is being uncooperative. I suppose it's possible I misremembered.