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Low 27 Bitcoin

Merge pull request #546 from LedgerHQ/simplify_ast

Public commit record

What the developer wrote

Authored by Salvatore Ingala

73/100 · Adequate
Merge pull request #546 from LedgerHQ/simplify_ast

Get rid of relative pointers in wallet policy AST
✓ Specific, descriptive subject✓ Names a concrete action or component✓ Provides an explanatory body✓ Links an issue, advisory, or supporting reference
The short version

What changed, and why it matters

This commit is a large internal refactoring of the Ledger Bitcoin app's wallet-policy parser. It replaces compact 'relative pointers' with ordinary memory pointers in the abstract syntax tree (AST) used to represent Bitcoin wallet descriptors. The change increases the memory each policy node uses, so the app also enlarges the policy buffer and updates related size limits. There is no direct evidence in the commit that this fixes an exploitable vulnerability; it appears to be a code-simplification and maintainability change. However, because it touches memory layout and parsing limits, it could indirectly affect security if the old relative-pointer scheme had subtle bugs or if the new buffer sizing introduces edge cases.

Recommended action

Treat this as a routine but high-touch refactoring. Review that the new pointer-based AST cannot be moved/copied (the commit notes this explicitly), and verify that all callers respect the lifetime of the underlying buffer. Re-run the existing test suite, especially deep-wrapper-chain and large-policy tests, on real device builds to confirm the increased buffer sizes do not cause RAM exhaustion on Nano X. No immediate security patch is indicated, but monitor for follow-up fixes that might reveal a latent bug in the old relative-pointer code.

Security signals we found

01

Large-scale memory-layout refactoring of security-critical parser

02

Removal of custom relative-pointer abstraction, eliminating a class of offset-calculation bugs

03

Increase in policy buffer size limits and key-info length limits

04

Addition of alignment static assertion for contiguous key-expression allocation

05

No explicit security bug fix or vulnerability disclosure in commit message or diff

Risk score

Why this scored 27/100

Our methodology →
Potential impact 5/30
Exploitability 3/25
Stealth signal 4/15
Affected reach 6/15
Confidence 6/10
Evidence quality 3/5
Human-validated context

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