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OneKey - Safe Crypto Wallet

Latest release: 2.12.3 ( 15th February 2022 ) 🔍 Last analysed 26th October 2021 . No source for current release found
4.7 ★★★★★
315 ratings
5 thousand
16th September 2020

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Do your own research!

Try out searching for "lost bitcoins", "stole my money" or "scammers" together with the wallet's name, even if you think the wallet is generally trustworthy. For all the bigger wallets you will find accusations. Make sure you understand why they were made and if you are comfortable with the provider's reaction.

If you find something we should include, you can create an issue or edit this analysis yourself and create a merge request for your changes.

The Analysis 

This app is the companion app of OneKey - Limited Edition No Source! .

Updated Review 2022-01-05: Hunting for the firmware source code and Android source has resulted in the request for the following in OneKey’s GitHub page:

link to the correct firmware and bootloader repositories link to the signed binaries for every release document how the hardware wallet asks the user for approval, at least optionally showing the binary’s hash, so the user can make sure he’s installing what he wants to install

App Description

  • Works with OneKey hardware wallet. Never access the Internet, safer offline storage of assets.
  • Seeds & recovery phrases are created, encrypted, and stored locally. So that only you can access them.
  • Open source, including code and hardware design.
  • We do not store any of the user’s private data.
  • Multi-platform supports, including Android, iOS, MacOS, Windows, Linux

The Site

Article: What is the private key?

Article: What if OneKey goes out of business?

First and foremost, OneKey aspires to be a 100-year corporation!

Second, even if OneKey goes bankrupt, your assets will be unaffected.

Your funds are stored on the blockchain, not on OneKey, and you can easily recover them by importing the mnemonic into a wallet that implements the BIP39 protocol.

The App

We downloaded the app.

The first options were to Create or Restore a wallet. If you select ‘Create’ you are then given the chance to choose different cryptocurrencies. You are then asked to backup the 12-word seed phrase.

Verdict

This app is evidently self-custodial. The repository only contains one commit from March 26, 2021 and the Google Play app has last been updated on June 29, 2021. Due to missing sources, we conclude that this app is not verifiable.

(dg, lw)

Verdict Explained

Without public source of the reviewed release available, this product cannot be verified!

As part of our Methodology, we ask:

No Source!

Is the source code publicly available?

If the answer is "no", we mark it as "No source for current release found".

A wallet that claims to not give the provider the means to steal the users’ funds might actually be lying. In the spirit of “Don’t trust - verify!” you don’t want to take the provider at his word, but trust that people hunting for fame and bug bounties could actually find flaws and back-doors in the wallet so the provider doesn’t dare to put these in.

Back-doors and flaws are frequently found in closed source products but some remain hidden for years. And even in open source security software there might be catastrophic flaws undiscovered for years.

An evil wallet provider would certainly prefer not to publish the code, as hiding it makes audits orders of magnitude harder.

For your security, you thus want the code to be available for review.

If the wallet provider doesn’t share up to date code, our analysis stops there as the wallet could steal your funds at any time, and there is no protection except the provider’s word.

“Up to date” strictly means that any instance of the product being updated without the source code being updated counts as closed source. This puts the burden on the provider to always first release the source code before releasing the product’s update. This paragraph is a clarification to our rules following a little poll.

We are not concerned about the license as long as it allows us to perform our analysis. For a security audit, it is not necessary that the provider allows others to use their code for a competing wallet. You should still prefer actual open source licenses as a competing wallet won’t use the code without giving it careful scrutiny.

The product cannot be independently verified. If the provider puts your funds at risk on purpose or by accident, you will probably not know about the issue before people start losing money. If the provider is more criminally inclined he might have collected all the backups of all the wallets, ready to be emptied at the press of a button. The product might have a formidable track record but out of distress or change in management turns out to be evil from some point on, with nobody outside ever knowing before it is too late.