Ex-Ledger CEO speaks out: "There is no back door"

Ledger has introduced a new feature. The crypto space applauds it with criticism. Former CEO Éric Larchevêque thinks this is completely unfounded.

Former Ledger CEO Éric Larchevêque has weighed in on Reddit to the community to address concerns about the security of the hardware wallet. Upon seeing "burning Ledger devices, insults" and "a lot of anger," the co-founder was "close to tears."

The background of the fierce reactions from the crypto space was the announcement of "Ledger Recovery." The new feature allows the seed phrase to be split into three parts and stored encrypted in a cloud.

Larchevêque admits it was a marketing disaster: "The Ledger Recover service was put in front of you in the worst possible way." However, "nothing has changed" in terms of portfolio security.

A minimum of trust in Ledger is inevitable anyway, the former CEO explains. After all, users must trust that the firmware on the devices does what the manufacturer promises.

"If you trust the device to only sign a transaction when you press a key, then you can also trust the device to only calculate an SSS (a split seed) when you press a key," Larchevêque argues.

Additional distrust of Ledger arose when the company deleted a tweet from its support department on May 17. It stated, "Technically, it has always been possible to write firmware that facilitates key extraction."

Ledger CTO Charles Guillemet was then forced to explain. The operating system of the hardware wallet is unable to copy the device's private keys without the user's permission.