Post
Topic
Board Hardware wallets
Merits 12 from 2 users
Re: Fuck you ledger
by
1980sFuture
on 26/10/2023, 17:50:34 UTC
⭐ Merited by NotATether (10) ,Pmalek (2)
Ledger has reveled something we initially thought was impossible because that's what we were told. And that's the way secure element chips function.

Just in the spirit of clarity here, I think while it's important to note that although Ledger's communication has been terrible and their marketing repeated this notion - the belief that a secure element could never reveal private keys in any form regardless of what firmware was thrown at it was and has always been incorrect. This was known long before Recover was ever announced. It's how hardware wallets work. Access to the private keys MUST be granted in order to sign anything. The concept of a HW wallet that can both sign a Tx and have ZERO access to the privkeys ever is possible in theory but not in practice as this would mean you would never realistically be able to update the wallet ever. No bugs could be patched etc. It's not practical. Forgive my inability to explain the technical details of this as I'll leave that to people smarter than me but this is how it was explained to me.

So the fact that your wallet can spit out your keys if the firmware allows it is NOT what the problem here is and I think it's very important to understand this in order to combat the gaslighting coming from Ledger. Coldcard will reveal your keys in plain text on the device as well as export them in encrypted form via SD card for a backup if you like. This in no way makes the secure elements or the wallet less secure, those are simply features of the device that are baked into the firmware. (You can always lock down the seed of you like to remove this feature of course but all of it is locked behind a pincode anyways) The crucial differences here are 1) you know exactly what the device is doing and 2) the keys if revealed are only being shown to you and you alone, they're not being sent anywhere. You can either see them on the device or you can export them encrypted on an SD. And 3) you were never led to believe this was impossible with fancy marketing that led you into a false sense of what the hardware was actually capable of. Ledger was deliberately misleading in their marketing at times even stating that "Not even a firmware update could extract your keys" when this was blatantly false. So when people who didn't know better learned that this was actually technically possible they lost it - but they lost it for the wrong reasons! The REAL reason this should worry people is that the process of extracting keys involves so much 3rd party trust and involves those keys being sent through your computer over the internet. That is what should frighten people, not that a SE can spit out a seed if it's told to.