The Ledger Nano S’ firmware has been recently updated to 1.5.5, while this update brings several features like the support of Groestl and Blake2b as new hashes, Schnorr with Zilliqa as a new signature scheme, Bip32-ed25519 as a new derivation scheme and several other major security updates.

It also caused troubles for its owners wanting to update. As this firmware is slightly larger in size than old ones, HSM servers hosting this update became unresponsive as many users were simultaneously trying to update their device, causing access to the Manager and installing apps to be slower than usual, a significant amount of users reported their device getting stuck during the update which would be later addressed with another update and an apology from Ledger.

Users also reported not being able to install as much stand-alone applications as before, users reported that while being able to install up to 3 applications before the update, they could only install 2 after the update, making the Ledger Nano S just a Bitcoin and Ethereum wallet for them, with no storage left to download any others.

This update is also very important, as it fixes a vulnerability that was found by Mycelium developer Sergey Lappo back in November 2018, this vulnerability could allow a compromised wallet to trick your Ledger Nano S into sending funds from all your accounts to an attacker’s wallet, while you were only sending a small amount from one of your accounts to another person, all without ever notifying you of anything wrong or malicious happening.

Ledger’s new firmware puts users into an unfortunate position; you must update your Nano S to avoid this vulnerability but in the process of doing so you will most probably lose access to a third application on your device, Ledger says its working hard to optimize the storage restrictions on both its firmware and its applications.

Links

• Official Update
• Ledger’s explanation on the issues