Coldcard’s 5-year flaw reveals hardware wallet testing gap: Kraken’s security chief

The five-year bug escaped detection because auditors verified that the intended random number generator existed, but not that it was being called.

Coldcard’s five-year seed-generation flaw has exposed a broader weakness in how hardware wallets are independently tested, according to Kraken chief security officer Nick Percoco. 

In an X post on Sunday, Percoco said the incident should be a “wake-up call” for hardware-wallet makers, calling for independent testing to verify that the approved source of randomness is the one actually used by production firmware. 

“Consumers are asked to trust a manufacturer’s implementation of the single most critical function in the system, with no independent verification that the approved entropy path is the one actually executing,” said Percoco. 

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