As part of our Methodology, we ask:
Published code doesn’t help much if the app fails to compile.
We try to compile the published source code using the published build instructions into a binary. If that fails, we might try to work around issues but if we consistently fail to build the app, we give it this verdict and open an issue in the issue tracker of the provider to hopefully verify their app later.
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.But we also ask:
Discontinued products or worse, products of providers that are not active anymore, are problematic, especially if they were not formerly reproducible and well audited to be self-custodial following open standards. If the provider hasn’t answered inquiries for a year but their server is still running or similar circumstances might get this verdict, too.
The Analysis ¶
This does not represent a full code review.
Bitcoin Wallet - Airbitz
claims to be non-custodial and open source but being the predecessor of
Edge - Bitcoin & Crypto Wallet ,
it gets a bit confusing here as it points to the same website
for its open source:
• Open-source code. Available at https://github.com/Airbitz
At github.com/Airbitz though, as mentioned in the article on Edge there is no code and we get forwarded to github.com/EdgeApp where there are currently 130 repositories and 81 repositories created by EdgeApp. There at first sight, the most likely source code for Airbitz Android app is airbitz-android-gui.
The Playstore mentiones Airbitz currently and since one year to be at version 2.4.12 yet on GitHub the latest tag is 2.2.0 from three years ago. The currently latest commit on master appears promising, as it has the commit comment “2.4.12”, the version we would hope to see matching the Playstore apk.
So … what do the build instructions tell us?
The Airbitz android application comes in 3 flavors. Production, Testnet and Develop. To build it issue one of the following commands:
Develop version (Seperate App ID which does not conflict with production version. Also uses the develop branch of airbitz-core-java)
./gradlew installDevelopDebugTestnet version
./gradlew installNettestDebugProduction version
./gradlew installProdDebug
For a reproducible build I would have hoped to find some buildProdRelease and
not only ...Debug.
So … lets try this:
airbitz-android-gui/Airbitz$ ./gradlew installProdDebug
Parallel execution is an incubating feature.
Incremental java compilation is an incubating feature.
FAILURE: Build failed with an exception.
* What went wrong:
A problem occurred configuring project ':airbitz'.
> Could not resolve all dependencies for configuration ':airbitz:_nettestDebugApk'.
> A problem occurred configuring project ':libs:airbitz-directory'.
> No toolchains found in the NDK toolchains folder for ABI with prefix: mips64el-linux-android
* Try:
Run with --stacktrace option to get the stack trace. Run with --info or --debug option to get more log output.
BUILD FAILED
Total time: 1.415 secs
Given there is no promise of reproducibility and no instructions on how to build the release version or implicit promise about plugins and APIs not resulting in big differences, we give up here for now and conclude the now obsolete but still available for install wallet Airbitz is not verifiable in its current form.
(lw)
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.