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COINiD Vault

Latest release: 1.5.5 ( 20th February 2021 ) 🔍 Last analysed 16th February 2022 . Failed to build from source provided! Not updated in a while
3.8 ★★★★★
5 thousand
14th October 2018

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Please help us spread the word discussing build reproducibility with COINiD Vault  via their Twitter!

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 for the Bitcoin Wallet for COINiD Build Error! Stale! and allows a setup with this being the actual wallet that holds the private keys without ever being online and the other app being the wallet interface that knows balance and receiving addresses but that can’t send coins without this app.

This app recently reached 1000 downloads, which is the minimum for being analyzed.

Unfortunately the GitHub repository has not much in terms of build instructions. In fact, this is their complete Readme.md:

COINiD Vault

Proper readme coming soon. If you have any questions you can contact us on our Telegram or via email.

Secrets.js

We are currently not including the secrets.js in the repo. If you want to compile the vault to test it you need to add the following to src/config/secrets.js.

  export const p2pCommonSecret = '';
  export const encryptPrivateSalt = '';
  export const pinSecret = '';

So the app is not only lacking build instructions but also parts of the source code (secrets.js). As such a secrets.js can’t be kept very secret when delivering the app to users, not including it in the repository does not achieve much.

The FAQ is clear about this app being a wallet by our understanding:

Do my private key ever leave my device? No, your private key never leaves your device. You are in full control of your private key.

Unfortunately it is also clear about not being reproducible:

Do you provide deterministic builds? Since we need to distribute the app via the App Store that is not possible. The source is however available on our Github so that anyone can review and compile it.

This is the first time we hear this claim. Why would the Android app have to be non-deterministic because of Apple?

For now we consider this app not verifiable and hope to see the issues resolved soon.

(lw)

Verdict Explained

We encountered a build error while compiling from source code!

As part of our Methodology, we ask:

Build Error!

Can the product be built from the source provided?

If the answer is "no", we mark it as "Failed to build from source provided!".

Published code doesn’t help much if the app fails to compile.

We try to compile the published source code using the published build instructions into a binary. If that fails, we might try to work around issues but if we consistently fail to build the app, we give it this verdict and open an issue in the issue tracker of the provider to hopefully verify their app later.

But we also ask:

Stale!

Was the product updated during the last year?

If the answer is "no", we mark it as "Not updated in a while".

Bitcoin wallets are complex products and Bitcoin is a new, advancing technolgy. Projects that don’t get updated in a year are probably not well maintained.

This verdict may not get applied if the provider is active and expresses good reasons for not updating the product.

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.