Hello,
Well, this is a question related to cryptocurrency in general, but since I like and trust this community most I’ll ask it here, maybe this helps. I know that Trezor is open source, so I guess if you have your seed phrase, and, for some reason(like the culture communists are preaching that it is totally ok to steal somebody else’s funds), Trezor locks you out of your wallet, you will still be able to get your funds somehow because you will be able to generate your private keys with your seed phrase since it’s open source. Right? Correct me if I’m wrong.
Now Ledger is not open source. Do we know how they create their seed phrase? If for some reason they decide to lock someone out of his account, we won’t be able to generate our private keys from the seed phrase? Is that right?
Thank you! I believe this will help a lot of people especially after this Metamask lock.
No thats not possible.
They probably could block you from using Ledger Live but you are able to restore your keys (with your seedphrase) in any other wallets (software) that supports bip-39 seedphrases.
1 Like
They can’t lock you out. You have the device in your possession. It doesn’t need to connect to them to continue functioning.
And even if they could – the process by which Trezor as well as Ledger derive the keys from seed phrase (and additional passphrase if you choose to use that) is known. We could write a software that uses it to restore everything and won’t even need a hardware device, then.
It would not have the security of a hardware wallet after doing that, but you would definitely have access to your funds.
(That’s also the reason why you should never input the seed phrase in something other than the hardware wallet. Once it’s out there, the security of the hardware wallet is gone for good.)
2 Likes
I’m not aware of any wallet app that already offers importing/restoring Ledger (or Trezor) seed phrases. I don’t know exactly why.
It’s easily implementable. On the other hand, if you offer it, people will use it without thinking much, which will render hardware wallets pretty useless (for them).
Edit: For the details, Trezor and Ledger use different methods of deriving the master key from the seed phrase as described in: https://github.com/cardano-foundation/CIPs/tree/master/CIP-0003#history
All(?) wallet apps just implement Icarus (and sometimes Byron), but they would have to implement Icarus-Trezor and Ledger to allow importing/restoring from a hardware wallet seed phrase without actually owning the hardware. Easily done, but not readily available right now.
1 Like
Yeah i mean most of them doesnt use the same derivation path but its technical doable if you are allowed /able to change the derivation path.
I think, the derivation and derivation paths afterwards are the same. It’s just a difference in the step from the seed phrase to the master key (the m at the beginning of derivation paths). Different ways of getting to that m would have to be implemented by the programmers of the wallet app.
2 Likes
Thank you very much for @Zyroxa and @HeptaSean
1 Like