French crypto unicorn Ledger warns of AI security risks

Artificial intelligence is "changing the security landscape". That's according to Ledger, a French unicorn of cryptocurrency that's seeking a bigger role in digital security. Chief Technology Officer Charles Guillemet says: "Finding vulnerabilities and exploiting them costs almost nothing. So this is the new challenge that we have, as the security industry in general – how can we raise the bar for security so it becomes so difficult to break systems? And I think hardware is part of the equation."

He says the company is rolling out a new device, Ledger Atom, that will better secure user data. "It's a physical device that looks like your phone, but instead of having the exact same hardware architecture inside, there is also the Ledger hardware specificities inside (...) Depending on which bank you're using, sometimes you have a security token that comes with it in order to authenticate yourself. It's a bit like this, but with a screen and in a generic manner – we can support any kind of use cases." 

Guillemet says Ledger is securing its distribution chains and hardware, after discovering some of its devices had been tampered with, leading to the loss of some $90 million of cryptocurrency. "We are improving the tamper detection mechanism inside Ledger Atom, there is specific technology that allows us to detect if the device has been modified." 

"Today, our main market is crypto mostly because crypto is a market where the stakes are very high. There are several trillions that are secured on the blockchain, and we estimate that around 20 percent of those trillions are secured within Ledger technology."