Kraken Hacked Trezor’s Hardware Wallets in 15 Minutes

Kraken Security Labs found a way to extract the cryptographic seeds out of Trezor’s One and Model T hardware wallets. Your coins may be at risk.

Given physical access to the device and sufficient know-how, the attack can be executed in approximately 15 minutes using ~$75-worth of specialized glitching hardware.

To make things worse, there’s nothing Trezor can do about it. The attack exploits a vulnerability in the firmware which leads to an inherent hardware vulnerability that cannot be patched without making substantial physical changes the device.

The problem namely lies with two micro-controllers Trezor hardware wallets use to store cryptographic seeds and other sensitive data. (More specifically, the STM32-based Cortex-M3 and Cortex-M4 micro-controllers.)

Using some apt voltage glitching, Kraken managed to corrupt the micro-controllers, extract the encrypted flash-contents, and then fully compromise the security of the device’s contents by brute forcing the PIN code ⁠— …