It would be really interesting to get the opinion of an expert in this field. I might send an email to Joe Grand to see what his thoughts on the matter are.
I haven't seen activity on his twitter page regarding Ledger Recovery, but I did find this[1] Discord message posted on Reddit (from Joe Grand Discord Server):
It looks like they're having the on-board SE encrypt the private key and split it into 3rds for offline storage in different HSMs. Given how many people contact me asking for help with a lost key, I can see something like this being beneficial for folks who aren't technically-inclined enough or don't have the capability to keep their hardware wallet physically secure and/or want to have a back-up solution of the key being stored elsewhere (which IMO negates the benefits of having a cold wallet). It seems like a move to mitigate the risk of losing all your funds in a cold wallet and a way to attract more people into the cryptocurrency space by giving the peace of mind. Even if the split encrypted key was recombined, AFAIK it would need to still be bruteforced before getting to the private key (or the encryption key extracted from the SE). I wouldn't call this a backdoor by any stretch, but given the paranoia in the cryptocurrency space, I don't think they did a good job explaining what it is and how it works.
This statement is dated 05/17/2023, just one day after the fiasco started. This was just one day after the whole fiasco started and considering that two weeks have passed, I am unsure if his opinion still stands considering the (limited) information that we currently have available for Ledger Recovery.
ive read good things on foundations passport.. anyone here want to chime in? might be off topic?
I think member n0once owns a Passphrase wallet, he even made detailed review in forum, so you can search for that.
In my opinion this is one of the best Bitcoin hardware wallets available today, but it's certainly much better than ledger.
Passport Review topic:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5421713.0Indeed a bit off topic, but I would just like to add two more links - For historical purposes and to compare how the product has advanced, n0nce also made a great review of Foundation Founders Edition[2] and you can also check Foundation Passport Official thread[3] for discussion regarding the device as well.
[1]
https://safereddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/13okszr/this_is_what_joe_grand_the_guy_who_hacked_a/[2]
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5382675.0[3]
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5441422.0