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Trustee Wallet bitcoin wallet

Latest release: 1.50.5 ( 11th February 2022 ) 🔍 Last analysed 30th July 2021 . Not reproducible from source provided
2.8 ★★★★★
16 ratings
14th June 2019

Jump to verdict 

Help spread awareness for build reproducibility

Please help us spread the word, asking Trustee Wallet bitcoin wallet to support reproducible builds  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 

Update 2021-02-07: This wallet has its issues you might want to take into consideration, too.

On the App Store the provider claims:

NON-CUSTODIAL
Trustee doesn’t authorize third parties to store private keys and details of your assets, so operations remain only yours!
Any time you buy or sell bitcoin we guarantee that no one else will save your transaction details. Everything is stored solely on your Trustee wallet and you are the only owner of your private keys and the seed phrase.

This is weirdly worded but the final sentence is very clear about who owns the private keys: You alone on your phone.

On public source their website claims:

Our benefits
Trustee Wallet is an open-source mobile multi-currency crypto wallet, this is the ideal solution for the safe storage and operational management of your crypto assets

and we found their GitHub.

There they comment in length on the issue of reproducibility for their Android app Trustee | crypto & btc wallet but make no such claims for their iPhone product which leads us to the verdict: not verifiable.

(lw)

Verdict Explained

We could not verify that the provided code matches the binary!

As part of our Methodology, we ask:

Unreproducible!

Is the published binary matching the published source code?

If the answer is "no", we mark it as "Not reproducible from source provided".

Published code doesn’t help much if it is not what the published binary was built from. That is why we try to reproduce the binary. We

  1. obtain the binary from the provider
  2. compile the published source code using the published build instructions into a binary
  3. compare the two binaries
  4. we might spend some time working around issues that are easy to work around

If this fails, we might search if other revisions match or if we can deduct the source of the mismatch but generally consider it on the provider to provide the correct source code and build instructions to reproduce the build, so we usually open a ticket in their code repository.

In any case, the result is a discrepancy between the binary we can create and the binary we can find for download and any discrepancy might leak your backup to the server on purpose or by accident.

As we cannot verify that the source provided is the source the binary was compiled from, this category is only slightly better than closed source but for now we have hope projects come around and fix verifiability issues.

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.