1. Gather Information

Our first step is to acquire as much information as possible about your wallet through vendor documentation and other open-source intelligence methods. We will check our knowledge base and community contacts for any existing research or vulnerabilities to aid in our success. If you have a software wallet, we will ask for anything you remember about your PIN, password, or passphrase.

2. Environment Setup

Next, we will set up an environment to ensure that we have a well-defined base on which to perform our work. For a hardware wallet, this means obtaining identical versions of the device to use for experimentation and testing. For a software wallet, this means acquiring and installing the same version of the wallet software that you originally used.

Our wallet(s) will be configured to match what you know about your wallet, so we're mimicking the real world as closely as possible.

3. Attack Discovery

Determining how to hack a wallet can take days, weeks, or months of effort. This is highly dependent on known vulnerabilities we can exploit to give us an advantage.

For a hardware wallet, there are a number of steps to take, such as:

• Understanding general design philosophy and identifying the core components through non-destructive imaging and/or product teardown.

• Reverse engineering the design through signal monitoring, protocol decoding, firmware extraction, and/or chip-level analysis.

• Creating a list of potential attacks based on our research.

• Iterating through the attacks until we are successful.

For a software wallet, we would write any necessary scripts, modules, or programs for use with our password cracking tools. We may also perform static or dynamic code analysis to identify weaknesses in the software wallet's cryptographic implementation that may reduce the time required for the attack.