RESEARCH | January 18, 2024

Owning a Bitcoin ATM | IOActive Labs Blog | Gabriel Gonzalez, Antonio Requena, Sergio Ruiz

In this IOActive Labs blog, Gabriel Gonzalez, Antonio Requena and Sergio Ruiz, of IOActive Research, explains the steps they followed to identify a series of vulnerabilities (CVE-2024-0175, CVE-2024-0176 and CVE-2024-0177) that allows full control over Bitcoin ATMs.

Nowadays, Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies might look less popular than they did just a few years ago. However, it is still quite common to find Bitcoin ATMs in numerous locations.

IOActive had access to few of these machines, specifically to Lamassu’s Douro ATM. This provided the team with the opportunity to assess the security of these devices – more specifically, to attempt to gain full control over them – assuming the role of an attacker with the same physical access to the device that a regular customer might have.