Details of the OLED Vulnerability and its MitigationThis article describes an information leak discovered in the OLED display used by hardware wallets, including Trezor One. We want to explain how this side-channel attack works and what measurements we took to mitigate the threat. This attack affects only the Trezor One; Trezor Model T is immune to this attack thanks to its entirely different display.
https://blog.trezor.io/details-of-the-oled-vulnerability-and-its-mitigation-d331c4e2001a Very smart!
Ledger too.
Like many hardware wallets, the Ledger Nano S and Ledger Nano X include an OLED screen to display sensitive information. In the case of Ledger’s products, the following information is displayed on the screen:
- The confidential recovery phrase during the setup,
- The PIN code entered to unlock the device.
As this information is confidential, we always recommend our users to operate their devices in a secure environment. In an unsafe place, someone could eavesdrop and gain access to critical information, and thus to your crypto assets.
Read more here:
OLED screen (minor) vulnerabilityThanks.
I really enjoy reading about such vulnerabilities, not only in order to take the necessary measures to protect myself (f/w updates, etc.), but also to admire the efforts of the hackers (well, the researcher in this case), for their ingenuity and cleverness. I'm an electronics engineer and I'm absolutely in love with my work. I can imagine the excitement that Christian Reitter felt when he saw those patterns on the oscilloscope's screen.
I think TREZOR's countermeasures are better than Ledger's. TREZOR's solution totally equalizes power consumption between different seed words, but sacrifices looks, while Ledger's maintains good looks, but sacrifices a little bit on security (screen content can theoretically still be inferred by power consumption patterns, but the process is now much more difficult).
tl;dr: Treat your TEZORs/Ledgers as physical wallets (like the one in your pocket carrying your fiat). Don't assume you are fully secure by using them. You can't begin to imagine what a good hacker can do once your device is in his/her hands...
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Edit: Check out the following related story. Long, but well worth the read. Hats off to the hacker!
https://www.wired.com/story/i-forgot-my-pin-an-epic-tale-of-losing-dollar30000-in-bitcoin/
