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Spatium Keyless Cryptowallet

🔍 Last analysed 19th May 2022 . Bad Interface

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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 

Background

Spatium advertises this product as a keyless wallet, claiming that their “proprietary Multi-Party computation protocol eliminates the need for private keys, removes the single point of failure, separating control over the funds from the responsibility for security.” The private key is replaced with a set of secrets distributed between the gadgets or devices stored on behalf of chosen institutions or people.

Spatium: NFT & Crypto Wallet No Source! is the companion app to this wallet on android.

Here is a video demonstrating a prototype. Note that the device in the video is different from the device’s picture on their website. The wallet has a screen display as well as a “button” for confirming transactions.

Spatium’s Medium article features more information about the product:

  • They use wireless (NFC and Bluetooth) technology to connect to external devices.

    Instead of wires, we use NFC and Bluetooth technology to securely interact with your other devices without any of the hassle common to today’s cryptowallets. This ability to crypto not only securely but wirelessly has been a demand of hardware (cold) wallet users for years.

  • Rather than having the user set a password, the product utilizes biometric sensors. The user is allowed to register five different fingers to unlock the device.

    The biometric sensor on our cold wallet allows you to scan five different fingers for the most secure, finger-injury proof method of authorization (this addresses a common fear/question about something happening that would make one finger’s print ineligible — for our wallet, there are 4 more fingers to work with).

    The biometric authorization is quick too: instead of remembering a lengthy password, just press one of the five saved fingers against the reader on the wallet.

Analysis

The article mentioned above also claims you can “check their progress in Spatium’s Github repository”. We checked the provided GitHub profile and found that none of the repositories have seen recent updates, and we could not find any directly relating to Spatium’s firmware.

Spatium’s code is not available for review. We believe that the most telling verdict is the lack of a screen on the Spatium Keyless Cryptowallet’s picture. Note that in the video described above, it has a display and buttons.

(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.

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.