Wallet Logo

Octowalletsilo

🔍 Last analysed 18th February 2022 . No source for current release found Not functioning anymore
3rd August 2018

Jump to verdict 

Help spread awareness for build reproducibility

Please help us spread the word discussing transparency with Octowalletsilo  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 

The last twitter post of the Octowallet was made on March 1, 2019.. The first working prototype was shown on twitter on August 3, 2018.. The Youtube video linked-to on the tweet is now removed.

Photos of the first order of Octowallet Silo’s are in this tweet.

The subdomain shop.octowallet.com is also no longer accessible as of today.

Advertised Features

  • Connecting to smart phone and other software wallets
  • Support Coins: BTC, BCH, DASH, LTC, ETH, More
  • Anti tempered firmware mechanisms
  • Physical Transaction Confirmation
  • Build-in hardware cryptography algorithm
  • Secure storage of Private Keys

Private Keys

Octowallet claims that it has utilizes “asynchronous ring oscillators whitened using LFSRs” to make private key generation more secure.

It also claims that the private keys are stored on the device.

We weren’t able to find references on the site claiming that it is an open source project.

The inaccessibility of Octowallet’s shop link, the inactivity of their social media accounts, the absence of their YouTube videos lend us to temporarily conclude that this product is no longer available in the market.

We reached out to Octowallet’s twitter to ask them whether their product is still available. Until such time they reply, we would have to conclude that this product was already discontinued.

(dg)

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.

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.