Coinkite has said the exception is anyone who used the device’s dice option, where a user physically rolls dice at least 50 times and types in the results, and the wallet builds its key from those numbers instead of generating its own. Those wallets never touched the broken code and are safe. Mk4, Mk5 and Q owners on firmware below 5.6.0 or 1.5.0Q should update, create a new wallet and then move their coins across.
A seed is the master key controlling a wallet’s coins, so one produced with too little randomness can be guessed and regenerated by an attacker, who can then drain the wallet without ever touching the device.
“Every wallet ultimately depends on a root secret generated from high-quality entropy,” Bouzon told CoinDesk in an email, adding that the generation of that entropy “must be anchored in secure hardware, with an architecture that cannot silently downgrade to an untrusted software-based source.”
He said the alternatives are worse, calling software wallets on non-secure hardware riskier still and saying that handing funds to a centralized exchange “isn’t ownership, it’s an IOU.”
Bitcoin traded near $63,800 in early US hours Tuesday, little moved following the wallet warning, per CoinDesk data.
