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BitArk Tin Key

🔍 Last analysed 17th May 2022 . Bad Interface Not functioning anymore

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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.

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The Analysis 

Background

BitArk Tin Key’s homepage is no longer online. We’ll round up some of the claimed features which are described on its twitter account.

Product Features

Hardware Wallet

  • Support most digital assets available in market including future digital currency issued by Country

Safe storage chip

  • Only has erase function, without hardware read interface, unable to crack
  • All data saved in circuit “Trusted storage area”
  • Private key from truly random nonce in a physical chip
  • Secure chip just has signature interface

Authentication

  • Develop protocol
  • Develop SDK
  • Open source code

Hardware Function

  • To store authentication certificate
  • To save private key

Analysis

The BitArk Tin Key is associated with the bitark.io exchange. This is evident in the cross-promotion between BitArk and Tinkey on their twitter and instagram accounts. Most of the activity from these accounts occured in 2018. The current bitark.io website does not refer to tinkey or to the exchange. The last Medium post of BitArk dated October 13, 2018, was specifying promotional procedures for its users which also involved receiving the device.

In order to give back to the community’s small partners, BITARK and Tinkey Wallet carry out the mining machine activities in the community. Anyone who is in the BITARK community can participate in this event. The specific rules are as follows:

Participate in the official BITARK thoughts:

  1. The number of ETH ≥ 5, you can get one Tinkey wallet;

We believe that this device has been discontinued a few months after its launch in the 2nd quarter of 2018. Its last tweet was dated October 25, 2018. Its last Instagram post was made in October 13, 2018. The url “tinkey.io” has not been archived in archive.org.

A picture of the device does not show a display interface. This picture also corroborates the fact that it was physically produced.

In some of its social media posts, we can see that it can be acquired by “donating some ETH”. Nevertheless, since the shop on its homepage is no longer available, it is safe to assume that the device is no longer in production.

(dg)

Verdict Explained

The design of the device does not allow to verify what is being signed!

As part of our Methodology, we ask:

Bad Interface!

Can the user verify and approve transactions on the device?

If the answer is "no", we mark it as "Bad Interface".

These are devices that might generate secure private key material, outside the reach of the provider but that do not have the means to let the user verify transactions on the device itself. This verdict includes screen-less smart cards or USB-dongles.

The wallet lacks either an output device such as a screen, an input device such as touch or physical buttons or both. In consequence, crucial elements of approving transactions is being delegated to other hardware such as a general purpose PC or phone which defeats the purpose of a hardware wallet.

Another consquence of a missing screen is that the user is faced with the dilemma of either not making a backup or having to pass the backup through an insecure device for display or storage.

The software of the device might be perfect but this device cannot be recommended due to this fundamental flaw.

But we also ask:

Defunct!

Is the product still supported by the still existing provider?

If the answer is "no", we mark it as "Not functioning anymore".

Discontinued products or worse, products of providers that are not active anymore, are problematic, especially if they were not formerly reproducible and well audited to be self-custodial following open standards. If the provider hasn’t answered inquiries for a year but their server is still running or similar circumstances might get this verdict, too.