Wallet Logo

CCWallet: Your Bitcoin Wallet

App Store
Latest Release: 1.1 30th July 2020

Our wallet review process

We examine wallets starting at the code level and continue all the way up to the finished app that lives on your device. Provided below is an outline of each of these steps along with security tips for you and general test results.

Developer

Website Twitter LinkedIn Facebook

Custody

Self-custodial: The user holds the keys

But This product was removed from the platform.

As part of our Methodology, we ask: Is the product self-custodial?

The answer is "yes". The user has control of their own keys.
Read more

Source code

Public on github

Released

21st June 2019

Application build

We encountered a build error while compiling from source code!
See the last Issue we created.

See test result
Tested 19th September 2021

Distribution

App Store
4.4/5 stars

Platform notes

On the Apple App Store, there are many apps that have Bitcoin in their name or description but don’t allow the user to use Bitcoin or they don’t look like Bitcoin wallets but turn out to be. We run our tests and document our findings.

WalletScrutiny started out looking only into Android. This is because mobile wallets are the most used wallets, and Android is the most used among mobile wallets, but looking into iPhone wallets was high on the list from the start.

For Android, the reproducing build process is relatively clear; some apps did this before we started the project. For iPhone, this was not the case. As a result, iPhone app reproducibility was an open question.

We asked around. Several years passed. Nobody could reproduce any iPhone app.

At this point, we shift the burden of proof onto the providers (or Apple). If you want people to trust your app (or platform), explain how it can be audited. We will move on in the meantime and list iPhone apps with an empty reproducible section until then.

Passed 7 of 9 tests

We answered the following questions in this order:
We stopped asking questions after we encountered a failed answer.

Is this product the original?

The answer is "yes".
If the answer was "no", we would mark it as "Fake" and the following would apply:

The answer is "no". We marked it as "Fake".

We did not ask this question because we failed at a previous question.
If the answer was "no", we would mark it as "Fake" and the following would apply:

The bigger wallets often get imitated by scammers that abuse the reputation of the product by imitating its name, logo or both.

Imitating a competitor is a huge red flag and we urge you to not put any money into this product!

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.
Is it a wallet?

The answer is "yes".
If the answer was "no", we would mark it as "Not a wallet" and the following would apply:

The answer is "no". We marked it as "Not a wallet".

We did not ask this question because we failed at a previous question.
If the answer was "no", we would mark it as "Not a wallet" and the following would apply:

If it’s called “wallet” but is actually only a portfolio tracker, we don’t look any deeper, assuming it is not meant to control funds. What has no funds, can’t lose your coins. It might still leak your financial history!

If you can buy Bitcoins with this app but only into another wallet, it’s not a wallet itself.

Is it for bitcoins?

The answer is "yes".
If the answer was "no", we would mark it as "A wallet but not for Bitcoin" and the following would apply:

The answer is "no". We marked it as "A wallet but not for Bitcoin".

We did not ask this question because we failed at a previous question.
If the answer was "no", we would mark it as "A wallet but not for Bitcoin" and the following would apply:

At this point we only look into wallets that at least also support BTC.

Can it send and receive bitcoins?

The answer is "yes".
If the answer was "no", we would mark it as "Can't send or receive bitcoins" and the following would apply:

The answer is "no". We marked it as "Can't send or receive bitcoins".

We did not ask this question because we failed at a previous question.
If the answer was "no", we would mark it as "Can't send or receive bitcoins" and the following would apply:

If it is for holding BTC but you can’t actually send or receive them with this product then it doesn’t function like a wallet for BTC but you might still be using it to hold your bitcoins with the intention to convert back to fiat when you “cash out”.

All products in this category are custodial and thus funds are at the mercy of the provider.

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.
Is the product self-custodial?

The answer is "yes".
If the answer was "no", we would mark it as "Custodial: The provider holds the keys" and the following would apply:

The answer is "no". We marked it as "Custodial: The provider holds the keys".

We did not ask this question because we failed at a previous question.
If the answer was "no", we would mark it as "Custodial: The provider holds the keys" and the following would apply:

A custodial service is a service where the funds are held by a third party like the provider. The custodial service can at any point steal all the funds of all the users at their discretion. Our investigations stop there.

Some services might claim their setup is super secure, that they don’t actually have access to the funds, or that the access is shared between multiple parties. For our evaluation of it being a wallet, these details are irrelevant. They might be a trustworthy Bitcoin bank and they might be a better fit for certain users than being your own bank but our investigation still stops there as we are only interested in wallets.

Products that claim to be non-custodial but feature custodial accounts without very clearly marking those as custodial are also considered “custodial” as a whole to avoid misguiding users that follow our assessment.

This verdict means that the provider might or might not publish source code and maybe it is even possible to reproduce the build from the source code but as it is custodial, the provider already has control over the funds, so it is not a wallet where you would be in exclusive control of your funds.

We have to acknowledge that a huge majority of Bitcoiners are currently using custodial Bitcoin banks. If you do, please:

  • Do your own research if the provider is trust-worthy!
  • Check if you know at least enough about them so you can sue them when you have to!
  • Check if the provider is under a jurisdiction that will allow them to release your funds when you need them?
  • Check if the provider is taking security measures proportional to the amount of funds secured? If they have a million users and don’t use cold storage, that hot wallet is a million times more valuable for hackers to attack. A million times more effort will be taken by hackers to infiltrate their security systems.
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.
Is the source code publicly available?

The answer is "yes".
If the answer was "no", we would mark it as "No source for current release found" and the following would apply:

The answer is "no". We marked it as "No source for current release found".

We did not ask this question because we failed at a previous question.
If the answer was "no", we would mark it as "No source for current release found" and the following would apply:

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.
Is the decompiled binary legible?

The answer is "yes".
If the answer was "no", we would mark it as "Obfuscated" and the following would apply:

The answer is "no". We marked it as "Obfuscated".

We did not ask this question because we failed at a previous question.
If the answer was "no", we would mark it as "Obfuscated" and the following would apply:

When compiling source code to binary, usually a lot of meta information is retained. A variable storing a masterseed would usually still be called masterseed, so an auditor could inspect what happens to the masterseed. Does it get sent to some server? But obfuscation would rename it for example to _t12, making it harder to find what the product is doing with the masterseed.

In benign cases, code symbols are replaced by short strings to make the binary smaller but for the sake of transparency this should not be done for non-reproducible Bitcoin wallets. (Reproducible wallets could obfuscate the binary for size improvements as the reproducibility would assure the link between code and binary.)

Especially in the public source cases, obfuscation is a red flag. If the code is public, why obfuscate it?

As obfuscation is such a red flag when looking for transparency, we do also sometimes inspect the binaries of closed source apps.

As looking for code obfuscation is a more involved task, we do not inspect many apps but if we see other red flags, we might test this to then put the product into this red-flag category.

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.
Can the product be built from the source provided?

The answer is "yes".
If the answer was "no", we would mark it as "Failed to build from source provided!" and the following would apply:

The answer is "no". We marked it as "Failed to build from source provided!".

We did not ask this question because we failed at a previous question.
If the answer was "no", we would mark it as "Failed to build from source provided!" and the following would apply:

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.
Does the published binary match the published source code?

The answer is "yes".
If the answer was "no", we would mark it as "Not reproducible from source provided" and the following would apply:

The answer is "no". We marked it as "Not reproducible from source provided".

We did not ask this question because we failed at a previous question.
If the answer was "no", we would mark it as "Not reproducible from source provided" and the following would apply:

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.
CCWallet: Your Bitcoin Wallet.  Google Play

Application build test result

Update 2021-09-11: This app is not on the App Store anymore.

(Analysis from Android review)

Also based on Emauel’s Analysis:

In the description we read:

We support Bitcoin, …

and

The code of our crypto wallet is open-source and it is available on GitHub.

but no claim about being self-custodial. Only:

CCWallet is a cryptocurrency wallet mobile app with the opportunity of sending, receiving funds, tracking transactions, as well as exporting & importing private keys.

which implies it is self-custodial.

Their website uses an ssl certificate that expired on 12/25/2020. That doesn’t look like a well maintained wallet.

Let’s see how far we get with building the app from the public source code:


$ git clone https://github.com/coincasso/ccwallet
$ cd ccwallet/
$ git log --oneline 
c1b4be7 (HEAD -> master, origin/master, origin/HEAD) +
c7cc54a Name changes
7c384e4 La commit
210b34a bugfixes
9443216 duzo zmianek
39e7af9 Merge branch 'dev1' of https://bitbucket.org/kacpertcn/coincasso-wallet into HEAD
f1586c0 -
9e08f77 face touch id p1
fc58f85 main store bugfixes
82e3500 decimals in erc20
c45af3e TouchID
e0e7ca3 erc20 value fix
13fc465 abifix
ce9857f abi fix
e33bdb4 few fixes
cb64865 erc20 tokens, bugfixes
a8e7a09 ccx token
293ba8d url to coincasso.com in settings
e5e6052 few visual edits
66dae07 no message
e5a1297 с1
cb8b083 initial

There is a total of 22 commits, all from May and June of 2019. None of them is tagged. As the latest update of the wallet according to Google is 2020-07-29, we have to consider the possibility that the app went closed source after an initial open source release.

Now the complete install instructions:

CCWallet

Installation

  sudo npm i rn-nodeify -g
  npm install
  cd ios
  pod install
  cd ../
  react-native run-ios
  react-native run-android

do not look like instructions that would produce an installable app package with the final run-android part. In ReactNative, that step should rather read: cd android; gradlew assembleRelease:

$ docker run -it --volume $PWD:/mnt --workdir /mnt --rm beevelop/cordova bash
root@8fc76c4dbdd3:/mnt# npm i rn-nodeify -g
root@8fc76c4dbdd3:/mnt# npm install
root@8fc76c4dbdd3:/mnt# yes | /opt/android/tools/bin/sdkmanager "build-tools;27.0.3"
root@8fc76c4dbdd3:/mnt# cd android
root@8fc76c4dbdd3:/mnt/android# ./gradlew assembleRelease
> Task :app:processReleaseManifest FAILED
/mnt/android/app/src/main/AndroidManifest.xml Error:
        uses-sdk:minSdkVersion 16 cannot be smaller than version 19 declared in library [:react-native-fs] /mnt/node_modules/react-native-fs/android/build/intermediates/manifests/full/release/AndroidManifest.xml as the library might be using APIs not available in 16
        Suggestion: use a compatible library with a minSdk of at most 16,
                or increase this project's minSdk version to at least 19,
                or use tools:overrideLibrary="com.rnfs" to force usage (may lead to runtime failures)

See http://g.co/androidstudio/manifest-merger for more information about the manifest merger.



FAILURE: Build failed with an exception.

* What went wrong:
Execution failed for task ':app:processReleaseManifest'.
> Manifest merger failed : uses-sdk:minSdkVersion 16 cannot be smaller than version 19 declared in library [:react-native-fs] /mnt/node_modules/react-native-fs/android/build/intermediates/manifests/full/release/AndroidManifest.xml as the library might be using APIs not available in 16
        Suggestion: use a compatible library with a minSdk of at most 16,
                or increase this project's minSdk version to at least 19,
                or use tools:overrideLibrary="com.rnfs" to force usage (may lead to runtime failures)

* Try:
Run with --stacktrace option to get the stack trace. Run with --info or --debug option to get more log output. Run with --scan to get full insights.

* Get more help at https://help.gradle.org

BUILD FAILED in 1m 43s
139 actionable tasks: 139 executed

so the build failed with the error:

> Manifest merger failed : uses-sdk:minSdkVersion 16 cannot be smaller than version 19 declared in library [:react-native-fs] /mnt/node_modules/react-native-fs/android/build/intermediates/manifests/full/release/AndroidManifest.xml as the library might be using APIs not available in 16

which looks like some react-native-fs library wasn’t pinned to an exact version. Reproducible builds highly depend on versions being pinned better to cryptographic hashes of the dependency than to a version number but looking where that dependency came from:

root@8fc76c4dbdd3:/mnt# grep react-native-fs package.json
    "react-native-fs": "^2.11.15",

the provider would be fine with any version higher than 2.11.15 of that library. This is highly problematic, not only because the build can’t be reproduced as soon as the library gets any update but also because it makes the wallet vulnerable to any such library getting an upgrade with a backdoor which would automatically get compiled into the wallet. Lastly it’s also problematic because the build instructions might change.

In summary, this app is not verifiable.

Tests performed by Leo Wandersleb, Emanuel

Do your own research

In addition to reading our analysis, it is important to do your own checks. Before transferring any bitcoin to your wallet, look up reviews for the wallet you want to use. They should be easy to find. If they aren't, that itself is a reason to be extra careful.