Good point. My guess is that they have put everything on hold for the time being. Ledger Recover has not received the reception they anticipated, and now they have to figure out how to re-introduce it with as little damage as possible to their company and future profits. Good luck with that Ledger...

There are no exact dates, but the way it was written suggests that we should already be somewhere between phase #2 and #3 if everything went according to plan. A few days after the roadmap announcement, they were supposed to release a Ledger Recover whitepaper and technical posts explaining the Recover feature. And a few weeks after that, parts of their Recover framework was supposed to become open-source. Etc., etc.,. It's just a waiting game now.

I won't mind having a Ledger hardware wallet if they pay me $9.99 monthly for the next 20 months  . I will share my seed phrase with them, but I won't share my identity. I mean, this is not a bad business Idea. I can buy a ledger nano x for $149 at my place, and if I get $10 monthly for the next 20 months, I will have $50 in profits after 20 months. Sounds great. I won't pay them a single penny even if they offer me a free hardware wallet right now. Sometimes companies ruin their user's trust, and it's impossible to build again.

All they want is to make money. They were criticized after the 3rd party seed phrase drama. But does anybody see any comment from them about this matter? The only thing I found is this; Pascal Gauthier, Ledger’s CEO and chairman, pushed back against the critiques on Twitter.

“Backdoor would mean that we control all ledger devices and could run automated updates for example… That’s not the case. Will never be the case. Only you can use functions on your ledger. No one else can enter your pin code and press those buttons…”^[1]

However, CZ criticized them as well ^[2]

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[1] https://dailyhodl.com/2023/05/18/crypto-hardware-wallet-ledger-responds-to-criticism-of-new-id-based-seed-phrase-recovery-solution/
[2] https://twitter.com/cz_binance/status/1658453341339283457

He should keep his mouth shut and worry about how he will save his company, and after all, it is hypocritical of him to criticize any HW at all, because what he really wants is for everyone to use his CEX as a storage wallet. In fact, there is no difference between what Pascal thinks about Ledger HW users and what CZ thinks about the majority of those who own cryptocurrencies.

We can complain and yell at Ledger in our ivory tower of knowledge and understanding of hardware wallets. We aren't the target users for Ledger, Paris with their opaque "you have to trust us" firmware. It's been said before, Ledger has good marketing and established a mantra that their obscurity model is something good, at least to an audience and user base who is too lazy to learn or understand the basics.

Ledger provoced a shitstorm and does now the sole thing they do well, a lot of bullshit marketing and throwing fog candles to blind the masses. Their eulogy and "dedication" for open-source is a joke and double slap in the face. Their timeline is pure bullshit and fog-in-the-air to delude and calm down opposers.

If someone still thinks the user has everything under control with the buttons on your Ledger NoNo, well good luck with your illusion. You might now have the control, but that must not be the case in the future when Ledger Live nags you to perform a firmware update or nothing will work until you obey.
The opaque firmware controls the MCU and secure element, the MCU controls the display and the buttons AND communicates with the secure element. The hardware buttons aren't wired directly in any way to the secure element where most important magic happens. The secure element runs firmware under control of Ledger and does only what the MCU tells the secure element to execute. The firmware is a black box and Ledger can program whatever they like. That is mostly the reality of Ledger f***ing NoNos. And if Ledger users would put a few brain cells together they could've know this even before the Recovery service debacle. Oh, wait, "You have to trust us"-Ledger lied all the time... too bad.



Don't give 'em ideas. Or paid Ledger Live & firmware updates. Or new Ledger NoNo Rec(t) for a symbolic single figure price but with mandatory Recovery service paid monthly^* (I reuse your starred legend, hehe)

OK, another shower thought. Would third parties know if I have my real wallet secured behind a passphrase? To illustrate, what if I enable Ledger's recovery feature and make that my "fake wallet", but the real wallet is the wallet that uses the same seed phrase BUT hidden behind a passphrase.

It could be useful if you need a wallet to use for plausible deniability.

 

When setting up a passphrase for your Ledger hardware wallet, you basically have two options: insert a passphrase every time you want to get access to "hidden" wallets or attach it to a PIN code, meaning that your passphrase will be recorded somewhere in a hardware wallet's memory and may be extracted and used after a PIN code was entered. In other words, Ledger adds a "Remember me" button for passphrases that essentially negates all the benefits of "25th word" and hidden wallets by making them publicly available for anyone knowing a short PIN code. Given that the Recovery feature doesn't make sense in cases where a user has set up a passphrase since a seed phrase alone is insufficient to get access to coins, it would make sense for Ledger developers to include a passphrase into this encrypted transfer scheme, especially considering the fact that it is equally important for a successful recovery and already sitting in a device's memory. Ledger developers could have issued malicious firmware stealing users' seed phrases and passphrases, but finally decided it would be more beneficial to create a service that people subscribe to and share private keys and identity information with absolutely voluntarily.

More information:

https://support.ledger.com/hc/en-us/articles/4983095135261-How-to-recover-your-passphrase-accounts-?support=true
https://support.ledger.com/hc/en-us/articles/115005214529-How-to-set-up-a-passphrase-?docs=true
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8jiqFYFi698

You basically throw your mnemonic words in a sanitized form together with the string "mnemonic" and an optional mnemonic passphrase (trailing space(s) matter!, I wouldn't speak of it as a 25th word because it's not necessarily a single word, contrary to the 12, 15, 18, 21 or 24 single mnemonic seed words) into a 2048 rounds of PBKDF2 with HMAC-SHA512 to get 64 bytes which are then further mangled in the so called BIP32 Root Key Derivation. See here: https://learnmeabitcoin.com/technical/mnemonic#mnemonic-to-seed

From a fixed set of mnemonic seed words any optional mnemonic passphrase gives an individual and unique wallet, there's no right or wrong like with a password or so. If you make a mistake in the optional mnemonic passphrase you get an empty wallet, if you get it right, you get your "hidden" wallet with your coins if you have transfered some coins on this "hidden" wallet's addresses.

No, I wasn't saying you won't be able to recover your hidden wallet in some other wallet software. I am saying Ledger tries to make passphrases less secure and more user-friendly, which, together with the announced Recovery service, is going to make a hardware wallet no better than a regular hot wallet. Passphrases should be kept separately both from the seed phrase and a hardware wallet itself: that's a rule that should be followed regardless of proficiency in security matters. Ledger relies too much on encryption and third parties not breaking trust and not sharing user data with unwanted entities, but we all know that the former will not protect if the decryption key is revealed, and the latter just goes against Bitcoin principles themselves.

Ledger has successfully blurred the line between malicious and "harmless" updates: both can now be used to extract seed words along with passphrases directly from a hardware wallet and in both cases, you are paying a price. Naturally, they could have stolen users' funds directly via Ledger Live malicious update, but it would break a continuous flow of income, which they strive to.

It is worse not only because of the services it offers but also because of implementation details and design decisions that imply keeping all eggs in one basket: anyone having physical access to a device will have all the information needed to steal the funds, anyone who has remote access to your device (like trusted third parties offering Recovery service) will also have everything. Curiously, they can reconstruct the history of your transactions and hand over it directly to IRS and other government entities without your permission.