Study of 85 Crypto Wallet Extensions Finds Address Leaks and Cross-Site Tracking Risks
Summary: Researchers at KU Leuven's DistriNet group tested 85 popular crypto wallet browser extensions, with about 35 million Chrome Web Store installs between them, and found the wallets leak addresses in ways that let outsiders link a user's separate addresses and follow them across sites. Seventeen wallets exposed connections between a user's addresses, 36 announced their presence to any page, 22 still let a site read the address after a revoke request, and 23 returned the address from inside a cross-site frame; the paper went up on arXiv on July 7 and is set for PETS 2026 in Calgary.
Why it matters: Most vendors the researchers contacted declined to treat the cross-site leak as a bug - MetaMask called it a known duplicate with no plans to stop injecting its provider, Rabby said the vulnerability does not exist, and OKX closed it as informational - so roughly 23 million installs sit behind a design their makers have chosen not to change.
Read the original at The Hacker News ↗
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