Fireblocks showcases defenses against nation-state attackers at Black Hat events

When North Korea’s Lazarus group wants to steal crypto, they don’t bother with phishing links aimed at your grandmother. They go after the cryptographic keys that control institutional wallets holding billions in digital assets. Fireblocks, one of the largest digital asset infrastructure providers, has been making the case at Black Hat conferences that the crypto industry’s defenses aren’t nearly good enough. At Black Hat USA 2023, Fireblocks dropped a research bombshell that sent ripples through the custody world. The company disclosed a set of vulnerabilities it dubbed “BitForge,” affecting threshold signature schemes used by more than 15 popular crypto wallet providers. The tagline for the presentation was appropriately blunt: “Small Leaks, Billions of Dollars.” What BitForge actually means What Fireblocks found is that the implementation of these threshold signature schemes, across more than 15 wallet providers, contained exploitable flaws. The BitForge vulnerabilities could potentially allow attackers to extract private keys from what were supposed to be hardened MPC systems. The August 9, 2023 presentation laid out how these small cryptographic leaks, individually minor, coul...