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Ledger library confirmed compromised and replaced with a drainer (twitter.com/bantg)
69 points by wslh on Dec 14, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 19 comments


The official Ledger post is here: [1] and we have asked there: "If there would be a post-mortem". Personally I think companies such as Ledger should be very aware and active over supply chain attacks [2]. They are not the first and they are a security company.

[1] https://nitter.net/Ledger/status/1735291427100455293

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply_chain_attack


Can anyone using the NPM ecosystem actually control their supply chain? Personally, I feel that anyone using JavaScript doesn’t care about such things. Because they can’t. Or has the landscape changed?


You can make things a bit better immediately by installing on outbound firewall like Little Snitch or Open Snitch.

And then if you install a malicious package that phones home, you might get an alert.

Of course this doesn't guarantee anything, as the package might activate the malicious behavior only under some specific circumstances. But it also doesn't cost anything. So it's a small win in my book.

Here's how it works in practice:

https://askubuntu.com/questions/1145649/apt-strange-requests...

--note this part in the accepted answer:

> they are surprised that more people hadn't noticed the behavior in the past.


There is another ongoing thread in HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38641211 with extra feedback.


I mean, I use NPM, but I'm making a small traffic news site with no APT enemies. If you're making a wallet and think "Yes, auto-updating dependencies sounds like a good idea," maybe you're not very good at security?



I just submitted an article with more information here in HN [1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38646314


For anyone who doesn't have an X account:

https://nitter.net/bantg/status/1735279127752540465


For a moment I thought you were talking about X11...


I'm curious if this will start changing developers' attitudes regarding supply-chain vetting.

My guess is that it won't for most, because convenience and expedience seem more rewarding than safety and diligence.


It will not; this is an identical attack to the Copay wallet hack over 5 years ago.

Solutions like lavamoat have been proposed and implemented in places, but they will not scale to the entire industry. There's a bigger problem in how innovation speed / developer convenience is inversely related to security.

In many cases it's literally cheaper to just wait for an attack and make victims whole. And even if not, it's hard to explain to your investors why it takes you half a year to build a product that took your competitors a month, so you just pretend the threat doesn't exist.


This is a well known and predictable attack vector. I’m surprised ledger didn’t already protect against it.


I think is more about solving some supply-chain attacks. For example adding a hash in a central place to check if the CDN content is valid. Something around that.


https://github.com/LedgerHQ/connect-kit/pull/30/files

Come on. This sensitive an application using a CDN at all, let alone a URL without version pinning?


This is literally done intentionally so that Ledger can update the library underneath dApp developers, without requiring them to release an upgrade to their apps. Was this a good choice? No. But it was done on purpose.


I didn't say if I thought it was done intentionally or not. Either way it's extremely unwise.


They've proven time and time again that they do not take security seriously enough.


I don't have that expectation, why would some library for dApps (or some other crypto nonsense) care about security? Like do you take this industry seriously? Why on earth would you?


For anyone confused like I was: this is about something related to cryptocurrency, not the Ledger CLI accounting/bookkeeping tool.




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