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Spatium Keyless Bitcoin Wallet

Latest release: 3.1.0 ( 9th June 2022 ) 🔍 Last analysed 17th November 2021 . No source for current release found
4.8 ★★★★★
32 ratings
6th August 2018

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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 

(Analysis from Android review)

App Description

Spatium is a unique keyless crypto wallet that allows you to easily and safely buy, store, and send crypto.

Spatium wallet, based on SMPC technology and anonymous biometrics, allows you to manage digital assets without a Private Key. It’s replaced with an encrypted set of secrets distributed between your device and professional security provider.

In this case this does not mean that the wallet doesn’t use a private key, with their server doing so. They claim there is no private key. Period. Which of course is bogus as Bitcoin transactions need a private key to sign.

It further claims to use biometrics to allow users to recover their data. In a Medium blogpost they mention more details.

The worrying part is that they use threshold signatures with secrets generated and never leaving other devices, allowing to define a threshold “k of n” of devices required to sign a transaction. Unless k=n, their (partial) custodians can collude against the user but with k=n, the user is still not in control of his funds. The custodians could extort the users: Give us half your money or we burn it all.

The App

There is a Bitcoin wallet with a send and receive function. Backup is possible through the use of biometric data.

Termination Clause in User Agreement

Upon termination of the Agreement, your account will cease to exist (be deleted). Upon termination of this Agreement, we will cease to provide services and you will cease to have access to the Application.

If you terminate the Agreement for any reason, you will not be entitled to any refund of fees for use of features of the Application (if any) or any other fees. No data from your prior Reports will ever be available to you.

Closed Source

reverse engineer, decompile, disassemble or otherwise attempt to extract the source code of the Software, except as expressly permitted by law in the jurisdiction in which you are located;

rent, lease, sell, assign or otherwise transfer the rights to the Application;

Verdict

Without the private keys, we do not consider hashed biometric data as a suitable replacement. Add to that the ability to terminate access to the application plus their unwillingness to share their source code. While this does not qualify as a self-custodial service it does not exactly look “custodial” either.

As this app does not have publicly available source code it is not verifiable.

(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.

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.