Leading provider of hardware cryptocurrency wallets, Ledger, is getting closer to launching a planned solution that can enable users to back up and get well Ledger device source material.
Ledger’s chief technology officer, Charles Guillemet, tweeted on June 21 announce that a hardware wallet company released a Ledger Recover white paper.
Today we publish the Ledger Recover white paper, a key step in enabling anyone to audit crypto protocols.
This relies on over 150 apps and other open source solutions that Ledger has already implemented.
Don’t trust, check. pic.twitter.com/SbjDQRYCQM
— Charles Guillemet (@P3b7_) June 21, 2023
Guillemet said the upcoming service is predicted to launch within the fourth quarter of 2023, provided by digital asset security firm Coincover. The major conclusion of the white paper is that the brand new service is “100% secure”, the CTO assured. “You can discover exactly how it really works from the technical side and check the service yourself” – he noted.
Available on GitHub, Ledger Recover technical paper ensure A 34-page document with a technical overview of Ledger’s hardware wallet seed backup and restore solution.
The Ledger Recover repository enables three basic operational flows, including backing up source material, restoring it to a recent device, and securely deleting backups. The white paper also comprises data on the design of the Ledger Recover system and the cryptographic protocol.
One implementation involves splitting the seed into shares using an existing private key distribution technology generally known as Shamir backup. “Owning lower than the required variety of shares doesn’t offer you any seed information,” the white paper notes.
The white paper emphasizes that users can run the protocol independently of Ledger, which is supposed to spotlight its flexibility and commitment to self-service.
As previously reported, Ledger’s seed recovery tool has drawn considerable criticism from the crypto community. According to the CTO, introduced in May 2023, the Ledger Recovery service is an optional subscription for users who need to back up the key recovery phrase.
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Many industry players, similar to Mudit Gupta of Polygon Labs, have drawn attention to potential vulnerabilities in Ledger Recovery. “The problem is that the encrypted parts of the keys are sent to three corporations that may reconstruct your keys,” he noted. Binance founder and CEO Changpeng Zhao also questioned the merits of the brand new tool, saying, “So the seed can now leave the device? Sounds like a unique direction than “your keys never leave the device”.
According to Ledger’s CTO, the brand new seed retrieval solution “doesn’t change the security” of Ledger devices. Guillemet also urged developers, researchers and cryptocurrency enthusiasts to read the white paper and fully understand the wallet’s security mechanisms.
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