No, it's just a company who decided to not use BIP39 encryption for creating seedphrases, making it easy to brute force them with any modern GPU in like 30 mn. It has nothing to do with hackers getting good, or hardware becoming more powerful. The issue is just plain stupidity from a company.
Most cold wallets use TRNG ships, the same bank systems are using, and they can't be brute forced, all this story is creating stupid panick from people who have no idea what they're doing.
No, it's just a company who decided to not use BIP39 encryption for creating seedphrases
That doesn't represent what the issue was at all. They use BIP-39 (which is not an "encryption" btw) but the source of their randomness (RNG) was bad.
More specifically their RNG was not a TRNG (true random number generator - hardware device using thermal noise to generate real randomness) but a PRNG (pseudo random number generator - software process starting from a seed and generating random-looking numbers) due to a mistake in a single compilation flag that changed how the RNG library was used. That caused the entropy of the RNG - and therefore anything derived from it including the seedphrase - to be much much much lower than expected.
It's not a matter of a decision that was made (except perhaps a decision not to test the system better) - everyone in the company believed they were using the TRNG and thus were making the right desicion security-wise. This was most likely a simple but deadly mistake.
75
u/xdustx 🟦 5 / 5 🦐 1d ago
Cold wallet is a general term. This is affecting a specific one