AirGap Vault - Tezos, Cosmos, Ethereum, Bitcoin

Published: September 02, 2020

This Android app was first launched on 6th August 2018 and currently has more than 5000 downloads, a 3.9 stars rating from 41 users and the latest release is version 3.5.0.

Our last analysis was done on 2nd September 2020 based on data found in their Google Play description and their website and their source repository. We discuss issues with the provider here. Our verdict was Reproducible when tested (details below).

We found these ways of contacting the developers:

Website: airgap.it/
Twitter: @AirGap_it
Reddit: r/AirGap

Date	Version	Verdict	Links
21st August 2020	3.4.0	Reproducible when tested	[1] [2]
22nd July 2020	3.3.0	Reproducible when tested	[1] [2]
17th July 2020	3.3.0	Not reproducible from the source provided	[1] [2]
28th April 2020	3.2.0	Reproducible when tested	[1] [2]
9th April 2020	3.1.0	Reproducible when tested	[1] [2]
6th January 2020	3.0.0	Reproducible when tested	[1] [2]
29th December 2019	3.0.0	Not reproducible from the source provided	[1] [2]

Older reviews (show 5 of 7 reproducible)

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Please follow AirGap Vault - Tezos, Cosmos, Ethereum, Bitcoin and thank them for being reproducible via their Twitter!

Disclaimer

The following Analysis is not a full code review! We plan to make code reviews available in the future but even then it will never be a stamp of approval but rather a list of incidents and questionable coding practice. Nasa sends probes to space that crash due to software bugs despite a huge budget and stringent scrutiny.

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.

The Analysis

For the latest version our test script. came to this conclusion:

Results:
appId:          it.airgap.vault
signer:         486381324d8669c80ca9b8c79d383dc972ec284227d65ebfe9e31cad5fd3f342
apkVersionName: 3.5.0
apkVersionCode: 21975
apkHash:        ec1ffc9b88898084eb66852b46c9460922401bd16b80ce20532c6a5548467aaa

Diff:
Files /tmp/fromPlay_it.airgap.vault_21975/apktool.yml and /tmp/fromBuild_it.airgap.vault_21975/apktool.yml differ
Files /tmp/fromPlay_it.airgap.vault_21975/original/META-INF/MANIFEST.MF and /tmp/fromBuild_it.airgap.vault_21975/original/META-INF/MANIFEST.MF differ
Only in /tmp/fromPlay_it.airgap.vault_21975/original/META-INF: PAPERS.RSA
Only in /tmp/fromPlay_it.airgap.vault_21975/original/META-INF: PAPERS.SF

Revision, tag (and its signature):
object 6b5aec1aba2003a8337122dde6c1da4257209aef
type commit
tag v3.5.0
tagger AndreasGassmann <andreas@andreasgassmann.ch> 1598961958 +0200

AirGap Vault version 3.5.0

which is what we expect to see for the verdict: reproducible.

Verdict Explained

Reproducible when tested At the time of this analysis, the app on Google Play was reproducible from the code provided by the developers!

The app can be independently verified. If the provider puts your funds at risk on purpose or by accident, security researchers can see this if they care to look. It also means that inside the company engineers can verify that the release manager is releasing the app based on code known to all engineers on the team. A scammer would have to work under the potential eyes of security researchers. He would have to take more effort in hiding any exploit.

"Reproducible" does not mean "verified". There is good reason to believe that security researchers as of today would not detect very blatant backdoors in the public source code before it gets exploited, much less if the attacker takes moderate efforts to hide it.

To understand why some lines of difference are ok and others not one has to consider how app signing works. Android supports currently 3 signing schemes and in version 1 signing the signature is put inside the application file. As the tester must not have the release signing key, those files necessarily are missing or differ from the version on Google Play. The file "apktool.yml" was never part of the app and is generated by the analysis tool "apktool".

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<iframe 
    src="https://walletscrutiny.com/widget/#appId=it.airgap.vault&theme=auto&style=short" name="_ts"
    style="min-width: 180px;border: 0;border-radius: 10px;max-width:280px;height: 130px;" >
</iframe>

will show

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<iframe 
    src="https://walletscrutiny.com/widget/#appId=it.airgap.vault&theme=auto&style=long" 
    style="max-width:100%;width:342px;border:0;border-radius:10px;min-height: 510px;" >
</iframe>

will show