1. Ledger devices aren’t affected. Here’s why: Ledger™ devices generate seeds using a True Random Number Generator inside a certified Secure Element.
It leverages chaotic physical phenomena on silicon to produce genuine entropy, so the seed is never derived from a predictable software source. Raw entropy is conditioned through cryptographic post-processing inside Ledger OS.2. Here’s what broke: Every private key you own derives from one number: the seed. If that number is predictable, everything derived from it is too. Coldcard’s firmware was supposed to draw that seed from a dedicated hardware RNG. It didn’t. A guard checked whether a config macro was defined, not whether it was enabled, so the build silently fell back to a software generator seeded from the chip’s serial number and timer, values an attacker can reconstruct.
Older devices were effectively deterministic; current ones were capped near 32 bits, about four billion possibilities. A seed space advertised as 128 bits collapsed to something you can enumerate. Researchers estimate more than 1,000 BTC drained from roughly 1,200 wallets, from a flaw sitting in public code since March 2021. The device never had to be touched.
A bad RNG is silent. The output still looks random and passes casual inspection. You discover the problem when someone else does, on-chain, at 21:56 on a Thursday. That is why randomness cannot be a software convenience with a fallback path. It has to be engineered, measured, and certified as a first-class security function.3. None of this makes us immune. It makes us measurable, monitored, and certified against exactly the class of failure that just played out. Cryptographic guarantees beat social trust, always. A seed you cannot predict beats a promise that it was random.
With modern LLMs, rediscovering vulnerabilities, understanding patches, and building exploitation pipelines has become dramatically easier. The window between “patched” and “weaponized” is shrinking.
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