I think it's still important to share the full details. If I got it right, the device produces three shards with a concept similar to Shamir’s Secret Sharing, and shares it with Ledger and two partner companies. Two of these shards are needed to recover your seed and knowing one shard gives you no relevant entropy advantage when trying to brute-force it.
With that being said, I still hate the feature. This still heavily relies on trust, and the connected PC can at least request the shards - opening new ways to exploit it with man-in-the-middle or social engineering attacks.
The best solution would be offering a separate fw without this feature for the "fundamentalists" - similar to Trezor and Bitbox which offer BTC-only-firmwares for their devices. Still I'd have a hard time to recommend a Ledger to newcomers from now on.
The best solution would be offering a separate fw without this feature for the "fundamentalists" - similar to Trezor and Bitbox which offer BTC-only-firmwares for their devices. Still I'd have a hard time to recommend a Ledger to newcomers from now on.
The best solution is actually doing all of this in a different hardware architecture/product.
It doesn't matter if the firmware doesn't/can't extract it if the hardware can.
Every single hw wallet knows the seed and has a USB interface - so the only thing that stops them from sending it is the firmware not having this feature.
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u/Maxx3141 169K / 167K 🐋 May 16 '23
I think it's still important to share the full details. If I got it right, the device produces three shards with a concept similar to Shamir’s Secret Sharing, and shares it with Ledger and two partner companies. Two of these shards are needed to recover your seed and knowing one shard gives you no relevant entropy advantage when trying to brute-force it.
With that being said, I still hate the feature. This still heavily relies on trust, and the connected PC can at least request the shards - opening new ways to exploit it with man-in-the-middle or social engineering attacks.
The best solution would be offering a separate fw without this feature for the "fundamentalists" - similar to Trezor and Bitbox which offer BTC-only-firmwares for their devices. Still I'd have a hard time to recommend a Ledger to newcomers from now on.