Source
r/Monero•
missingforever

Question about Ledger Nano S integration

I'm not a programmer, so please bear with me. This may be a weird question but I've been thinking, XMR has 25 mnemonic seeds. The Ledger Nano S has only 24. As far as I know, the 25th word in the mnemonic seeds is only considered a checksum (correct me if I'm wrong, it is one of your previous 24 words), so my question is, what will happen to the supposed checksum in the integration in Ledger Nano S if it only supports 24 words? Will it just disappear? If yes, is it not that important?

Thank you!

Posted Jan 12, 2018, 6:43 PM UTC

127
acre_•

The Ledger checksum is used to generate all of the keys for all their supported coins, this is called an HD wallet or a hierarchical deterministic wallet. So the keys for the Monero accounts will be generated from Ledgers checksum.

Deterministic (seed) wallets are relatively new feature, you can still generate non-deterministic wallets today using the CLI wallet software.

5
missingforeverOP•

Isn't it going to make it less secure or something? Haha, thank you for your patience.

1
acre_•

Well that's why you keep your Ledger secure. The ledger itself it pretty cryptographically sound. The keys are stored on a Secure Element and never actually leave the SE.

1
missingforeverOP•

Thank you!

1
nei_takk•

In a sense it would fitting that monero would only be accessible on ledgers if you used the optional added security, and plausible deniability, that a 25th word brings.

1
dylanreid•

the 25th monero seed word is a checksum of the first 24 (i.e. it is derived from the first 24), so it could not just be set as the 25th ledger seed word...

2
nei_takk•

Couldn't that be implemented still though? I'm sure it wouldn't be straigthforward, but since the 25th generates a brand new wallet anyway I would think it could be done.

If you tried opening the monero app without it, it could just give you an empty wallet with an error message.

1