Looking at the script, I see nothing about it extracting and accessing the seed phrase.

For reference, these are the functions being used when converting the seed phrase directly on the hardware wallet (referred to as "Online" in the Readme):


All these functions do, is load the Monero-specific word list onto the hardware wallet. And while I don't understand the contents of the APDU (if anyone has a reference at hand that'd be greatly appreciated, as I didn't find any and it has sparked my intrigue), I can see that there's only write operations taking place with no data being fetched from the dongle (ie. nowhere in the code the return value of dongle.exchange is being used, though in this case it's probably just result and error codes).

Keep in mind that displaying the seed phrase on the hardware wallet's display doesn't imply that the wallet application is able to access it. It can tell the dongle to display the seed phrase without having access to it itself. To some extend this even applies to the firmware, but that depends on the architecture of the device and as we've seen for Ledger that's not the case anyway (the firmware not having access to the seed phrase, that is).

Please note that I'm not saying that this proves that applications can't access the seed phrase. I'm just saying that this particular example does not access the seed phrase.


Regardless of that, I agree with your conclusion:

I have already did it. Moved the whole of my stash to Passport2 developed by Foundation devices.

After doing that punched both SE and MSU on Ledger board by two strokes of hummer. The final result is simple as that

He was pretty honest revealing that information, although we could have guessed it already. Maybe he did it as a sort of warning to Leger users. He seems pretty disappointed in what they did, and this could be his way of voicing that. Connecting KYC with your wallets and private keys and handing those keys for "safekeeping" to companies that have to adhere to government regulations and requests can only end exactly the way Éric said.

Man man, what a window have you/them open here.

Im not a lawyer but i have some really good foundations and knowledge on that nad also i can say nobody neither a lawyer can know the answer to that. Because we are going to end in a more philosophical and constitutional discuss.

Because this requires a one more "positive" action made by the goverment and the law, lets me explain, freeze your assets its a "passive" action. For example i can freeze your assets in a bank account but i cant touch them until a full statement its made.

And in this case, what are the seeds? are data and a private thing? or they are an asset? can the IRS make a movement or they gonna need a full judgment?

Because nobody know how much you have in that, its very diferent to a exchange where the exchanges can share the balance info of you account, here its very difficult.....

It's a fair point, and I think this territory of law remains untested. For example we all know that exchanges can freeze funds, as they are the custodians. But do governments have the license to freeze funds and transfer them to another account, which would be required in order to seize those assets? The answer is almost certainly so. If you consider some of the darkweb busts, they involved seizing the assets, and thus transferring them to another account. As obviously otherwise leaving them in the same account (even with an exposed seed) could lead to those accused or accomplises transferring those assets elsewhere...

I otherwise think for a general "investigation" certain government agencies could gain access to your seed with subpoenas and otherwise not have license to transfer your funds elsewhere, but otherwise I don't think it would take much for them to get a warrant to seize those funds if they had a legal reasoning to do so, which can only be done by transferring them into their own custody. It also seems like it's not going to take long before US gov ends up gaining these seed phrases from users they deem to be criminals who have signed up for the recovery service, so we'll find out soon enough what happens to those assets.

Ledger is a failure and I think no one should rely on their words anymore, at least since things are clear. Are you sure that your keys weren't even revealed before this latest firmware update and it wasn't backdoored the whole time you were using it?
It's not only okay but necessary to go brutal on own Ledger devices

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Here is the podcast with Pascal Gauthier, the CEO of Ledger. He says that customers who talk to them, frequently say that they can't trust themselves with 24 words seed and that's the reason why Ledger came up with Ledger Recovery service. He also confirmed in live that technically, government will be able to subpoeana users and get access to their funds
But if you watch the podcast, one thing is clear, Ledger CEO and people around him think that KYC has become a normal procedure in crypto business that people have accepted and taken it normally. For that reason, he thinks that KYC procedure is very much okay for Ledger Recovery service users.
I don't know what to say, it's shit!

Their firmware is completely closed source but as the CEO of Ledger said in that podcast, over time, they'll open more source of their code until they reach a level similar to Raspberry Pi.
I think it's okay if Hardware Wallet firmware remains closed source, at some point I even agree with that approach because on another hand, even if certain company has an open-source firmware, how can you be sure that they are actually using the open-source code? Is it possible to verify in case of hardware wallets? Maybe I lack technical knowledge here.

It also doesn't fix past 'mistakes'. For instance, they could have spied on users for the last few years, patch it out and then open-source the firmware.
It is easy to see that if you used the firmware before it was fully open, there will always be a risk that some of your information has been compromised (by Ledger or others).

Yes, you can and should.
A good hardware wallet manufacturer will actually advise and instruct its customers how to download the firmware, verify its integrity and flash it. It should also make sure to have reproducible builds; this means being able to easily check that the firmware download matches the code.
It should also be easily possible to compile it yourself, alternatively.

The guys over at WalletScrutiny check popular wallets from time to time to see whether their builds (firmware blobs binaries) match the open-source code. In case someone cannot doesn't want to do it themselves, and they trust them, that's a good resource.

The CTO just shared this on Twitter. Ledger's open source roadmap:



Your thoughts?