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Jaxx Liberty - Trade Crypto

Latest release: 3.0.0 ( 20th June 2022 ) 🔍 Last analysed 20th May 2021 . No source for current release found
4.5 ★★★★★
1558 ratings
3rd October 2018

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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 

This app is non-custodial:

Get started with an industry-standard 12-word backup phrase that is portable to and from other wallets. Sensitive information like your backup phrase and private keys are never stored anywhere but your device. Jaxx Liberty is a non-custodial wallet, which means you own the keys. You’re in control. We can’t even access them.

The maker of Jaxx Classic & Jaxx Liberty is Decentral which was founded by Anthony Di Iorio, co-founder of Ethereum in 2013.

We couldn’t find source code for this wallet. Looking for the code we came across this article: “Jaxx Liberty Wallet Review: Complete Beginners Guide”. Some excerpts:

“the old Jaxx Classic wallet in June 2017 led to the loss of $400,000 in various cryptocurrencies from user wallets. Most of that loss was from a single user’s wallet, and in that case, it could have been avoided since the user was managing his Jaxx on a rooted Android device.”

“There is also an improved new security model that protects your sensitive information with a strong password, using AES-256 encryption enhanced by 5000 rounds of PBKDF2 password hashing.”

“Two things that are missing are 2-factor authentication and open source code. That said, they do make all the code viewable, with the exception of the code for the UI.”

That last one we were looking for. Without the full source code and full instructions on how to build the wallet, a reproducible build is not possible.

Verdict: This wallet is not verifiable.

(lw)

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.