Ledger Wallet Has Glitch With Bitcoin Cash Holdings

Investing, News | April 10, 2018 By:

Digital wallet company Ledger has experienced a problem with its Bitcoin Cash wallet, leaving its users unable to access the BCH in their device, make any transactions, or even see their coins.

An announcement on Ledger’s official website says that a glitch happened because of a new version of Bitcoin-ABC (Bitcoin Cash node) breaks compatibility with the service’s parser. “As a result, balances shown on the Ledger Wallet are incorrect. Our engineering team is currently working on a fix.”

Ledger indicates all funds are secured and users can still safely receive transactions. “In case of emergency, you can use Electron Cash to access them.”

While Ledger at first promised the fix would take hours, it has now indicated it will take longer than expected. No time has been set for full restoration.

Nicolas Bacca, Ledger CTO, said on Reddit that his team is still investigating and will take days to fix. “I’m not following this closely, but if invalid data was fed into our parser, it could be necessary to reparse the whole chain, which will take a few days. Thanks for your patience, and feel free to open an issue on Electron Cash github if it isn’t working properly.”

This latest Ledger problem follows a report last month that a teenage British white hat hacker exposed a vulnerability in the Ledger digital wallets.

Saleem Rashid, age 15, claimed he discovered a flaw in the Nano S and Nano Blue wallets from Ledger. The opening allowed him to access the product keys and gain control of the coins held there.

Ledger’s Nano contains “secure element” chips that store payment information, but can only be viewed by connection to a micro-controller that will put them on-screen. Rashid claimed that by manipulating the micro-controller through the installation of his own version of the firmware that runs the Nano S, he accessed the wallets.

Rashid boasted about his tactic in a subsequent blog post.

Ledger Chief Security Officer Charles Guillemet said the flaw Rashid discovered was “serious but not critical.” A patch for the Nano S is now available, with the Blue patch set to arrive in a few weeks.