DEF CON 34 – Main – Breaking the Ethereum Phone From BootROM to Wallet Signing Keys – Guanxing Wen

Crypto phones promise the convenience of a mobile OS with hardware-backed key management. We tested that claim on dGEN1, the Ethereum phone marketed for digital-asset custody, and present a full compromise from bootrom to wallet key recovery.

Starting from a bootrom-level misconfiguration, we reverse the modern MediaTek bootchain and introduce a Loader-of-the-Loader technique for patching later boot stages entirely in memory, yielding EL3 code execution without modifying physical flash. From that foothold, we trace how boot-level compromise propagates into the device’s lock-screen verification path, enabling offline brute-forcing of the user PIN and recovery of the wallet’s primary ERC-4337 signing key. We further show that a separate identity flaw in the asset-claim workflow allows pre-activation theft using identifiers printed on a sealed retail box.DEFCONConferenceRead More