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Comment by klinch

17 days ago

Man, I wish there were some pictures. I didn’t even know that there are LTE modems that small.

There are pictures online. And for an unexplainable reason it is the person behind the biggest Bitcoin exchange SNAFU of all times (where hackers stole something like 800 000 Bitcoins), Mark Karpeles of "Mt. Gox" (who did jail time btw), who was the first to post them:

Apparently the hacker did remove the battery and replace it with a smaller one, leaving enough room for the tiny eSIM/LTE modem / OCR chip that did recognition of the secret on screen.

https://www.tibane.net/research/ledger-nano-x-implant

They're here. It's wild.

  • What incredible engineering

    • It's a great hack. I wonder why they didn't just spin a new board and transplant the secure-enclave chip to it.

      I guess the sweatshop workers would then need to be trained in reballing BGAs if they did that.

  • I want to read that but my slop detector went off. Instant disinterest.

    Give me a shitty html4 page with the text ffs.

    • It's definitely AI-written, annoying as fuck god damn it, but the photos are good and the descriptions of the boards, are at least at cursory glance, pretty accurate.

      tl;dr Implant is just a little cell phone that does OCR of the hardware wallet's screen during setup to steal the recovery phrases. The implant's design has improved notably three different times before landing on a pretty darn sleek spot-welded overlay that is laminated flat onto the host.

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Look at the size of the board in something like a late-model iPhone. The biggest part of a regular smartphone is the battery. The modem and RFIC along with supporting discretes are absolutely tiny. They've been making wrist-sized watch-phones for many years.

This was already the level of integration 13 years ago: https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/the-12-gongkai-phone/

Observe how the SIM card socket is the biggest part on the board: http://bunniefoo.com/ntw/dozendp_8.png