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Foundation Passport

Latest release: v1.1.0 ( 2nd August 2022 ) 🔍 Last analysed 7th August 2022 . Reproducible when tested Review might be outdated
1st July 2020

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Older reviews (show 3 of 3 reproducible)

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Disclaimer

The following Analysis is not a full code review! We plan to make code reviews available in the future but even then it will never be a stamp of approval but rather a list of incidents and questionable coding practice. Nasa sends probes to space that crash due to software bugs despite a huge budget and stringent scrutiny.

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 provider released a new version. Here we try to reproduce it again, using our test script (?):

$ ./scripts/test/hardware/passport.sh 1.0.8
...
ad6b4f5f4ae0b7e05ec35415713ea1ff7dde3edf10870876b1c8bd07391419d1  build-Passport/firmware.bin

root@cae95eed5f75:/passport-firmware/ports/stm32# exit
ad6b4f5f4ae0b7e05ec35415713ea1ff7dde3edf10870876b1c8bd07391419d1  -
ad6b4f5f4ae0b7e05ec35415713ea1ff7dde3edf10870876b1c8bd07391419d1  firmware-passport-v1.0.8.bin

As with other hardware wallets, we did not check if those clipped bytes are signatures or valid but leave that to actual code reviews: If the code of the hardware wallet does what is claimed, it interprets those bytes as signatures and checks them. In other words, if the public source code is secure, then the link with the binary is established. This product is reproducible.

(ml, lw)

Verdict Explained

The binary provided was reproducible from the code provided.

As part of our Methodology, we ask:

Reproducible

Does the binary we built differ from what we downloaded?

If the answer is "no", we mark it as "Reproducible when tested".

If we can reproduce the binary we downloaded from the public source code, with all bytes accounted for, we call the product reproducible. This does not mean we audited the code but it’s the precondition to make sure the public code has relevance for the provided binary.

If the provider puts your funds at risk on purpose or by accident, security researchers can see this if they care to look. It also means that inside the company, engineers can verify that the release manager is releasing the product based on code known to all engineers on the team. A scammer would have to work under the potential eyes of security researchers. He would have to take more effort in hiding any exploit.

“Reproducible” does not mean “verified”. There is good reason to believe that security researchers as of today would not detect very blatant backdoors in the public source code before it gets exploited, much less if the attacker takes moderate efforts to hide it. This is especially true for less popular projects.

But we also ask:

Review Outdated!

Does our review and verdict apply to their latest release?

If the answer is "no", we mark it as "Review might be outdated".

Verdicts apply to very specific releases of products and never to the product as a whole. A new release of a product can change the product completely and thus also the verdict. This product remains listed according to its latest verdict but readers are advised to do their own research as this product might have changed for the better or worse.

This meta verdict is applied manually in cases of reviews that we identify as requiring an update.

This meta verdict applies to all products with verdict “reproducible” as soon as a new version is released until we test that new version, too. It also applies in cases where issues we opened are marked as resolved by the provider.

If we had more resources, we would update reviews more timely instead of assigning this meta verdict ;)