Ledger Nano S Plus cold wallet test – Security minimum

The Ledger Nano S Plus cold wallet is an improved, larger-screen version of the previous Ledger Nano S, which is a device that every crypto investor should own. In the next review, I will cover the types of crypto wallets, the benefits of cold wallets, the ANSSI certification, the CC EAL6+ security level, and much more for the Ledger Nano S Plus.

💰The pendrive-sized product costs 55 EUR (~65 USD) including shipping, which is the minimum required for anyone who wants to own Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, and other digital currencies. 

The French company ships the product from an EU warehouse, the fee for this is approximately 11 EUR.

🗝️If you want more serious protection with Web3 wallets and you choose the Ledger Nano S Plus cold wallet, click on the link below: OFFICIAL SITE.

📒Table of Contents📒

I have created a table of contents to make it easier for you to navigate the longer articles:

• 👛About crypto wallets in general
• 🫁What is Air Gap?
• 🔐What is the CC EAL standard?
• 🤵Ledger Nano S Plus look
• 🧑‍💻Ledger Nano S Plus Software
• 🆚Ledger Nano S Plus competitors
• 👊Ledger Nano S Plus Summary

🪙What is Ledger Nano S Plus? About crypto wallets in general

A crypto wallet is a software or hardware device that provides access to your digital keys. Your crypto instruments always exist on the blockchain, and wallets just help you access them somehow. However, most investors don't care how they manage this access, as long as they don't lose a significant amount of money in a data breach, a virus, or some similar problem.

Since one of the characteristics of blockchain technology is a high degree of anonymity, these lost investments are either very difficult or almost impossible to recover, which is why it is worth protecting yourself with physical crypto wallets, such as the Ledger Nano S Plus, which is actually nothing more than a hardware key. But to understand why it's important to have not only a software wallet, but also a physical one, let's quickly go over the basic concepts.

📟What types of wallets are there?

🔥Hot Wallet (software wallet): Applications that are constantly connected to the internet (e.g. phone apps, browser extensions like MetaMask) are also called Web3 wallets, as described in our article below.

• ✅Advantage: fast, convenient, free.
• ❌Disadvantage: more vulnerable to hacker attacks and viruses.

❄️Cold Wallet or cold storage (hardware wallet): physical devices that store private keys offline. This includes the Ledger Nano S Plus.

• ✅Advantage: maximum security; the private key never leaves the device.
• ❌Disadvantage: It costs money and you have to physically have it with you for every transaction.

The term hard wallet is also often used synonymously, but this does not refer to the state (this is a cold wallet), but to the fact that there is a physical device that performs the cold wallet function. For example, you can write your private key on a piece of paper, which is also a “cold wallet”, but not a hard wallet. In practice, however, investors use the two terms interchangeably.

There is one problem with hard wallets: you plug them into another device, a phone, a computer that is connected to the internet or another network, so theoretically it can be infected or infected firmware can be uploaded to it, which is why they invented the Air Gap.

🌪️What is Air Gap?

Air Gap is one of the highest levels of cybersecurity. It means that there is a physical distance between a given device and the internet (or any network), no cables, no Wi-Fi, no Bluetooth. Back when I was working in IT, we just called this “galvanic isolation”, meaning that the devices had no physical points in common with each other.

This is good because the device cannot be infected, a QR code is used for transactions, which is read with a camera, but there are also NFC chip-based solutions, which is how transactions take place. These devices tend to have two problems:

• 🔏They are more convenient to use,
• 🏷️they are much more expensive than non-Air Gap solutions.

❓How does this work for the Ledger Nano S Plus?

Although you plug the Ledger into your computer via a USB cable, security experts say this is a “pseudo-air-gap.” Why?

• 🧱Isolated environment: Inside the Ledger is a special chip (Secure Element, this is the CC EAL6+ mentioned in the introduction). This chip is physically isolated from the USB connector. The Secure Element is manufactured by STMicroelectronics, and the internal workings of this chip are not open source, but everything else is.
• ✍️Signature, not data transfer: When you initiate a transaction, your computer sends the transaction data to Ledger. Ledger signs it inside the “vault” and only sends back the completed signature. The private key never goes out on the wire for a millisecond, in theory.

There are also so-called “Full Air-Gapped” wallets (e.g. Keystone, NGRAVE, ELLIPAL, Passport brands), which do not even have a cable, this is the previously mentioned QR code or NFC solution. In the case of Ledger, you will see that the saying “the private key will never be released” is not entirely true, which has caused a minor outrage in the crypto community. But first, let's look at what the CC EAL6+ standard does.

🔐MWhat does the CC EAL security standard mean for the Ledger Nano S Plus?

Continuing the previous discussion, I'll talk a little about the CC EAL standard, which is nothing more than an abbreviation for Common Criteria. It's an international collection of standards (ISO/IEC 15408) created by governments and intelligence agencies to uniformly measure the security of IT products. So it's essentially a cross-system, where EAL is the security level and shows how thoroughly and rigorously the product has been tested.

Basically, EAL levels can vary from 1 to 7, with a “+” sign indicating that a given device exceeds the level but does not reach the next. In comparison, EAL 1 means “they checked whether what the device promises is true”, while EAL 7 corresponds to a military-government level that has been specially tested beyond EAL 6, such as the control of nuclear reactors.

The Ledger Nano S Plus CC EAL 6+ level means that it offers military-government-grade protection, is protected against physical attacks, and has been independently certified by ANSSI (the French national cybersecurity agency), in case you don't believe the manufacturer. Before everyone throws out their brains, a lot of competitors have the CC EAL 6+ certification - e.g. Trezor products - so this is not an extra in the market, but rather a kind of expected minimum.

📚Ledger Nano S Plus hard wallet review – Available in many colors

Now that we've gotten the technical details out of the way, I finally got my hands on the Ledger Nano S Plus physical wallet box and poured out its contents. I would describe the box as plain but nothing special. The contents are pretty typical, but I'd say they're still generous for the price:

• 🔌 1 Type-C-to-USB port (data cable)
• 🔑 1 key ring
• 📝 3 pieces of paper for writing down the private key (Recovery Sheet)
• 📖 lots of descriptions and information
• 🛡️ 1 Ledger Nano S Plus hardware wallet

From the above, you can guess that the Nano S Plus connects to your computer via a USB cable - so there is a physical connection, it is not an air gap device - but it is interesting that they do not offer a unit with a Type-C cable on both ends. So, if you want to use it with a phone, you have to buy one, plus it's not that practical to plug a dongle into your phone, nor to take a picture of an Air Gap QR code. I can kind of imagine all of this in a home environment, where it wouldn't really be a problem.

The Ledger Nano S Plus itself is a flash drive-sized device with a cover that can be folded back, thus covering and protecting the port. The quality is okay, the body is plastic, the cover is steel, it makes a bold impression and is available in many colors, and there are also special editions. In the middle, the data can be read on a 1,1-inch, 128×64 pixel resolution mini OLED display, and the two upper buttons are responsible for control, essentially a "next-next-finish" device.

🤖However, it is important to note that the Ledger Nano S Plus can only work with Windows or Android mobile phones, so anyone who uses Apple products should buy the Ledger Nano X, as it has a Bluetooth module.

Setting it up is not a big adventure, you just plug it into your PC and download the application, you need Ledger Wallet Desktop (Ledger Wallet Desktop), or connect it to your phone via the Ledger Wallet Mobile app (Ledger Wallet Mobile). For those who are completely new to the subject, Ledger will help you set up the device, practically guiding you through the process.

🛟Ledger Nano S Plus hard wallet test – Strict gatekeeper

Let's start with the operation of the Ledger Nano S Plus hard wallet, which is not a magic lock. It has a total of 2 buttons and a display, the buttons can be used to move left and right in the menu, while pressing the buttons simultaneously allows you to accept or reject operations. Since the Ledger Nano S Plus does not have its own power source, you always have to plug the physical wallet into a device for it to work.

After turning on the Ledger Nano S Plus, you must first set up the device, which the manufacturer says takes 30 minutes (but you should expect 1 hour due to updates), which consists of the following:

• 🔢 you must choose a pin code consisting of 4-8 digits,
• 📜 a 24-word recovery key (also known as a master key, secret recover key or recovery seed/seed phrase, I've seen all of them described),
• 🔌 you need to plug the hard wallet into your computer using a USB cable,
• 💻 you need to install the Ledger Wallet app on your computer,
• 📥 you need to install crypto apps in the Ledger Wallet app.

I came across two things about the Ledger Nano S Plus physical wallet that made me think. One is that after installing Ledger Wallet, the application offers to save your 24-word encryption key to the cloud as part of the paid Ledger Recover service - which I will call the master key from now on for the sake of simplicity -, the service costs ~10 USD/month.

🗝️I think every crypto enthusiast knows that the point of the 24-word private master key is that only you know its contents, but since it's too long to remember, the Ledger Nano S Plus box also includes 3 recovery cards on which you can write it down.

I have a crypto acquaintance who keeps a copy of his master key with one or more friends, splitting the key into 8-word parts, some people make off-line backups of it, I've also heard that some people rent a safe for it and store it there. Ledger Recover puts this thing in parentheses, which essentially goes against the basic concept of the blockchain, which stores the key in the cloud, which if lost, will be released to you after identifying your identity. The problem with this is that:

• 👤❌ this is not anonymous either,
• 🔓⚠️ It's not safe either, as 3 providers store the key in 8-word chunks, and two pieces are needed to release the entire key.

If you use this service, you have to believe that 2 out of 3 providers do not cooperate and that the state does not legally force the providers to release the data, and you still have to pay ~120 USD per year for all this. Then there is also the problem of how the seed phrase can be removed from the hardware, if the essence of the Ledger Nano S Plus is that the key never leaves it? For me, this goes against the spirit of crypto, so I didn't use it, but if someone changes their mind - don't - they can subscribe to it in the "[L] Recover" menu item at the bottom left.

The other thing is that you need to update the software version of the Ledger Nano S Plus before using certain cryptocurrencies. You need to create an “application” for that chain on different blockchains, so if you want to receive Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana or anything else on your hard wallet, it has to support it in software. My Ledger Nano S Plus downloaded 4! different updates in about 15 minutes until it reached the “up to date” status, which slightly extended the initial setup time.

The Ledger Nano S Plus's 1.5 MB of memory can handle roughly 100 crypto apps, while the previous Nano S could only handle 3-5 apps, I think the former amount will be enough for everyone. There are blockchain apps that use shared resources, e.g. Polygon is built on Ethereum, so these were used to save space in the past. Once the appropriate blockchain apps are added, you can open wallets in them, these will have unique addresses, but will come from the same 24-word master key. The prerequisite for creating a new wallet is that the old one is not empty.

Deleting the apps does NOT delete the account behind them, if you put them back in, you will see the addresses and crypto assets again. This is not typical today, but a few years ago, due to limited memory, it sometimes happened (e.g. in the case of the Nano S) that you had to delete some apps to install new ones.

🧑‍💻Ledger Wallet and Ledger Live software

The Ledger Wallet desktop software is the control center from where you access everything, and for all operations, it reaches the hardware wallet to enable them. The menu presents the options in two rows, one horizontal and one vertical. In the former you will mainly find the settings, but I would like to highlight a few of them:

• 👁️‍🗨️ toggle discreet mode: this can be used to hide specific numbers on the interface
• 🛡️ My Ledger: shows Ledger Nano S Plus data
• ⚙️ Settings/Ledger Sync

The latter is interesting because it shows how much memory the crypto apps have used, what is the version number of the software running on the hard wallet, and here you can install new apps or open new accounts, but you can also access this from the "account" menu item in the horizontal menu.

There's nothing special in the settings, except for Ledger Sync, which, if you turn it on, will sync your Ledger Wallet data with the Ledger Live mobile app using a QR code. You'll still need a hard wallet to perform transactions, but the data will appear in two places.

The Home button in the horizontal menu is essentially the same interface as if you were using a stock finder, showing market sentiment, sorting crypto assets, viewing prices, tracking your portfolio, and so on. Ledger Live currently lists and manages over 15000+ different cryptocurrencies, tokens, and NFTs. The swap menu item is essentially used to exchange two assets between each other, while the earn menu item can be used for so-called staking, when you can receive a few percent interest in the given cryptocurrency on your deposited crypto assets.

💡If you are interested in how you can access higher interest rates directly on the blockchain (especially if you already have a Web3 wallet that Ledger Wallet automatically creates for you), then our next article is for you: How can your assets generate money? What is yield farming?

What's also interesting is the "card" menu item, which is essentially a bank card that opens a gateway between the world of fiat and cryptocurrencies. Crypto Life is a debit card provided by Baanx to Ledger that allows you to pay by converting your cryptocurrencies into a foreign currency – EUR, USD, etc. – in real time, allowing you to pay virtually anywhere that accepts debit cards. One thing to keep in mind, however, is that since cryptocurrencies are quite volatile, it is not worth doing this without reason.

🦾Pro tip: If you exchange a cryptocurrency for USDC, USDT, or other stable coins, you can hedge some of the volatility, as you can also pay with stable coins, which are typically pegged to the USD.

🆚Ledger Nano S Plus competitors

The Ledger Nano S Plus costs around 75-80 USD including shipping, so I looked at what else I could get on the market for around that price or a little more, but of course I also took the functionality into account:

* This is not fully open due to the contracts regarding the aforementioned STMicroelectronics Secure Element.

This is how opponents react to the Ledger Nano S Plus hard wallet:

• 🆚Of the above, the Ledger Nano S Plus is actually the rival of the Trezor Safe 3, which is different in that it is open source, which many people like for security reasons, but the functionality of the two devices is similar.
• 🆚BitBox is a premium device manufactured by Shift Crypto, which also has a “Bitcoin Only” version, which is a device for those who only want to store Bitcoin. The BitBox02 doesn't require a separate cable because it's like a flash drive, meaning you just need to plug it into a device you want to use it with, and it can also save the master key to an SD card.
• 🆚Tangem Wallet is actually a package of 3 NFC cards, where you can't even see the 24-word master key, it can't be reset, you can only order a new card, and you need an NFC-capable mobile phone.

📌In practice: I have read two narratives regarding the Ledger Nano S Plus, but also Ledger products in general. One is the opinion of hardcore crypto enthusiasts that they should never use Ledger because the software is not 100% open source, it does not work with Air Gap logic, and the master key can be saved in the cloud.

The other narrative is that this is not the case, because the software is 95% open source, you don't have to use the Ledger Recover service and this solution is much better than a web wallet, which I agree with. But I don't want to push the wagon of either camp, everyone decides for themselves which side they support, you can find plenty of videos about them on YouTube.

📜Ledger Nano S Plus summary

The Ledger Nano S Plus hard wallet is a great entry-level device, and unlike older models, it finally has enough memory, so it can be used with multiple cryptocurrencies and countless wallets, but it only supports Android, not iOS, which is where the Ledger Nano X comes in. It's perfect for beginners, the software isn't too complicated, and after the initial setup, it's not particularly tricky to use.

However, anyone who is more serious about the crypto world will sooner or later need a more serious Air Gap device, especially if they store tens or hundreds of thousands of USD on it. For those who haven't reached this level yet, the Ledger Nano S Plus cold wallet, which costs roughly 55 EUR (~65 USD), is a very good choice. Since the company is French, there is no need to pay customs within the EU, but they charge an additional 11 EUR for shipping.

🗝️If you want more serious protection with Web3 wallets and you choose the Ledger Nano S Plus cold wallet, click on the link below: OFFICIAL SITE.

🤑You can find our other links related to the crypto world at this link: crypto articles.🤑

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS ABOUT THE LEDGER NANO S PLUS PHYSICAL WALLET

How much cryptocurrency can I store on the Ledger Nano S Plus?

The Ledger Nano S Plus supports over 15000 different crypto assets, and thanks to its increased 1.5 MB memory, you can install up to 100 different applications on it at the same time. It is important to understand that this hardware wallet does not actually store the coins, but the private keys associated with them, so there is no upper limit to the amount that can be stored. This hard wallet allows you to manage your entire portfolio, whether it's Bitcoin, Ethereum, or even smaller altcoins, through a single secure interface, Ledger Live.

Is the Ledger Nano S Plus more secure than a stock wallet?

Yes, towering, because it's a so-called cold wallet, which means your private keys are never exposed to the internet. When you hold your money on an exchange, you don't actually own the keys, so if the exchange gets hacked or goes bankrupt, your assets could be lost. With Ledger, you become your own bank, and because you have to physically confirm transactions with the device's buttons, it's much harder for a hacker to steal your cryptocurrencies (though it's still not impossible).

What happens if you lose or break your Ledger device?

Since the Ledger Nano S Plus is just a gateway to the blockchain, losing your device does not mean losing your money as long as you have your 24-word recovery key. With this code, you can instantly regain access to your assets using any other compatible hardware wallet or software solution. That’s why it’s critical to never take a photo of these 24 words or store them digitally, only on paper or a metal tablet in a safe place.

Can the Ledger Nano S Plus be used with a mobile phone?

The Ledger Nano S Plus is primarily designed for computer use via a USB cable, but is also compatible with Android phones using a suitable OTG cable. Since this model lacks Bluetooth (which is available on the more expensive Nano X), you can't connect it directly to iPhones due to cable limitations. If you want to check your balances on the go, the Ledger Live app will show you your portfolio's current status in read-only mode at any time after syncing.

Do you have to pay a monthly fee to use Ledger?

No, once you purchase the Ledger Nano S Plus, the device and its accompanying Ledger Live software are completely free to use. There are no mandatory subscription fees to access the basic wallet features or store your cryptocurrencies. Only the optional Ledger Recover service has a monthly fee, but this is just an optional convenience feature without which this hardware wallet works just as securely and fully.

Legal and liability statement (aka. disclaimer): My articles contain personal opinions, I write them solely for my own entertainment and that of my readers. The articles published here do NOT in any way exhaust the scope of investment advice. I have never intended, do not intend, and am unlikely to provide such in the future. What is written here is for informational purposes only and should NOT be construed as an offer. The expression of opinion is NOT in any way considered a guarantee to sell or buy financial instruments. You are SOLELY responsible for the decisions you make, and no one else, including me, assumes the risk.