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Incognito crypto wallet

latest release: 4.7.0 ( 1st October 2021 ) last analysed  1st October 2021 Not reproducible from source provided 
3.9 ★★★★★
85
21st August 2019

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Help spread awareness for build reproducibility

Please help us spread the word, asking Incognito crypto 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 

(Analysis from Android review)

After many many reviews of custodial wallets, this one makes a promising claim:

Don’t leave yourself exposed. Go Incognito. It’s non-custodial, decentralized, and completely open-source.

And indeed there is a repository with 3647 commits by 16 contributors with recent commits. That looks solid!

Unfortunately the project appears to not share the needed .env file for reproducible builds or otherwise build instructions for that purpose.

We reached out to them in this issue and hope to get feedback, soon but for now the app is not verifiable.

(lw)

Verdict Explained

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

As part of our Methodology, we ask:

Is the published binary matching the published source code? If not, we tag it Unreproducible! 

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.