Topic: Armory - Discussion Thread - page 129. (Read 521829 times)

Update,

(1) 0.87.9X hasn't gone so smoothly.  It looks like most of the problems are unicode-related (and one bitcoin.conf file problem).  I was planning to fully upgrade Armory to be unicode-friendly with the new wallets, and most people can avoid using unicode in most fields until then... except with this new version.  I have to get some unicode fixes in there, as there's quite a few people who aren't able to use the new version without it!  Hopefully that will resolve a bunch of the problems I've been observing in testing.

(2) I released a signed, 0.87.95 offline bundle, which works for Armory GUI, but not the frag-unfrag scripts.  I included them, but it turns out I made a git merge error and they don't work!  However, I merged things into testing, which includes this, and I'l re-release the offline bundle along with the unicode fixes.

P.S. -- Geezuz, what a day on Gox! 

Ah, the difference is that it's easier to input with keyboard than with mouse.

Will do. Thanks.

Not without taking a screenshot.  Though I was close to figuring out how to put images on the clipboard, but I never quite got it to work.

On the other hand, screenshots aren't so bad.  Both windows and linux, you should be able to -printscrn or -printscrn and it will put the window in focus on your clipboard which you can then copy into another application.

Is there a way to save an image file of a QR code?

I'm not sure I see the difference.  I'm using a 80-character alphabet of "symbols" to represent my password (they just happen to be the same symbols I have on my keyboard).  And I'm displaying those symbols on the screen.  The downside is those symbols are chosen by the user, and have this "shift" key artifact that reduces entropy if someone measures the shift key presses.  And if they have lots of duplicate characters.

But those "weaknesses" are solved by the dynamic keyboard.  I think the only difference is what it "looks" like.  And in the end, using my way (dynamically-changing keyboard), the person still has the option to type it in if they don't really care.

Thanks Alan, your point about virus just getting keys from RAM makes sense.

That being said, I think it would be much easier to pick symbols from a paper and input them then using a dynamic keyboard....

By the way, I just merged the managesatoshi branch, along with the frag/unfrag scripts into the testing branch.  This is a much better place to have people test it!

I think I'm going to try to get a Troubleshooting page up before release, and link to it in the program.  In all the testing so far, a couple problems keep popping up over and over.  Especially the corrupted database issue (which, it turns out, is caused by incompatible versions of BDB ... mostly a Linux problem using the PPA). 

Also, I found out that there is an option when running bitcoind, "-dbcache=" where X is how much extra RAM you want to allocate for blockchain processing.  Increasing this value speeds up that initial download quite considerably.  I was already detecting system RAM, so I put in a condition to allocate an extra GB if you have 5+ GB of RAM, or 2GB if you have 10+ GB.   On my system, that initial download is probably twice as fast with the 2GB option.

Oh, well for that the scrambled keyboard would seem to be the best solution, since it works with existing password systems.  The symbols technique would require creating a new password-based system... or at least new interfaces to create it.  

I guess the metric to use would be how much extra data does a really smart keylogger have to collect to circumvent this?  Screenshots after every keypress?  At this point, it's no longer a keylogger and just a virus, which if it's this smart, it can just wait until your wallet is unlocked and extract the encryption key from RAM  

PS - Note that if you use the "dynamic" keyboard, the {shift} key is scrambled with everything else, and the keys re-randomize with every key press.  If you use the simple scrambled keyboard (which is randomized once), then something that records mouse click locations gets:

(1) Pressing the shift key is not obscured, so you lose one bit per character to the keylogger, which can now see "UULULLLU" where "U" is uppercase/shifted, "L" is lowercase/unshifted.   This is likely not enough to brute-force your passphrase, but it's still information leakage, and might make the difference between a weak-but-prohibitive passphrase, and one that is worth brute-forcing.
(2) If you have repeated letters in the passphrase, you further lose a little information with the simple keyboard.  i.e. if your passphrase is "9999999", then the recorder sees that your password is 7 instances of the same character.  

For the dynamic keyboard, repeated letters and shift presses, all look like different letters, to anything recording mouse-click locations.  It's optimal "scrambling", though I truly believe that anything in place that could exploit the simple keyboard, has enough to take your coins, anyway.

Presumably, what you suggested would provide similar benefits as the dynamic keyboard gives you, which is producing a "code" which doesn't have repeated characters and which does not have the equivalent of "shift" presses.  My point is that the dynamic keyboard achieves that for you.

Well, what I actually meant is it maybe effective against the keyloggers, seeing that you are actually interested in doing something with that.

What do you mean?  It's one page back:  https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.1761230

As for your idea:  I think there's some good ideas out there, but I think they're not much benefit over the existing version.  Yes, you can make it harder it for someone to share their passphrase if you use symbols, or textures, etc.  But I don't think it's worth the effort.  With my limited time, I have to pick and choose my battles wisely, and I don't think that one is one I want to battle

Where have your screen keyboard posts gone, etotheipi? Anyway here is an idea, how about the kind of trick implemented by banks: produce an encrypted wallet and a list of symbols using a passphrase, print out the list in paper, each time when the user wants to access the wallet, he is prompted to pick a certain series of symbols from the paper, what do you think?

"Beta" is mostly related to the usability and stability of the interface.  Not the underlying security of the wallet.

At this point, it's getting almost 10k downloads per month!  (used to be 2k, but the recent surge in activity has really propped it up!).  It's extremely stable and in the past 15 months, I've never heard of anyone losing money with Armory except when they didn't make a paper backup!

-- Lots of people have forgotten their wallet passphrase and their wallet became permanently encrypted.  Can be recovered from a paper backup
-- A few people have had their hard-drives fail/corrupt.  You are safe if you have a paper backup.
-- Some people have explicitly deleted files or wallets thinking they know better than Armory what needs to be deleted.  Two people have contacted me about losing coins because they explicitly did this.  They would've been protected if they had made a paper backup.
-- If you want to switch away from Armory at some point, you can "Backup Individual Keys" to write out all the private keys in your wallet and import them into another application.
-- I think some apps have even implemented Armory's paper backup code, so that you can plug it directly into that app and it will restore the keys. 

There's not very much risk involved, besides time wasted if it doesn't work on your system.  It's used to protect millions of dollars worth of BTC at this point.  I haven't touched Bitcoin-Qt or any other app in 12+ months.  A lot of other people haven't either.  The most important thing is to print or copy-by-hand a paper backup, and very little can go wrong.

EDIT: This message does not override the existing license you agree to when you run Armory.  Although Armory is extremely stable, and has never lost anyone's money, that doesn't mean it's impossible.  It's free software, it's still run at your own risk.  Please base your decision on its reputation in the community (such as being featured on bitcoin.org), and don't sue me if something goes wrong!

Armory is still in beta stage, how safe is it to use offline wallet feature? What if there is a bug and my wallet is gone? Can i import my offline wallet to another client (Qt client)?

The first line in the release notes will be about fully removing Armory before upgrading.  I've actually had quite a few people with that problem.  Glad it went smoothly for someone!  I usually only hear bad stuff!


Please do not do this.  Just make digital copies of the wallet, and import them in multiple places.  The wallets are absolutely not "thread-safe" which is what you're doing if you access it from multiple system.  Either make digital copies and import it on multiple systems (with the risk of some address re-use, because some systems don't know that certain addresses have already been distributed), or just make multiple wallets.  Since each one is only one sheet of paper to backup, if you are going to use multiple systems regularly, it might better to keep track of which computer is producing which addresses.

The Windows 98 computer didn't agree to run the .msi file. It also didn't open the Ubuntu installer, and boot from CD was definitely abnormal, didn't work. I'm not sure if this tells anything about Win 98 itself, just about that elderly computer. I am going to try with XP next.

I should have saved information from the popup, but upgrading from 0.87 or so on Windows, I was getting a crash immediately on startup. Uninstalling, deleting the ArmoryBitcoin folder, and reinstalling fixed the problem. I've upgraded a few times so were some old files left in there when I deleted it. After reinstalling starts up no problem.

Auto-installation went smoothly! This is actually pretty awesome because I don't have a persistent bitcoin daemon running on my Windows partition.

Oh, and I love the new scanning progress bar with estimated time to completion. Very slick.

I'm really looking forward to Armory persisting its own blockchain data, I'll gladly trade disk space for memory (using 2.5 GB now). Do you have any idea how much faster startup should be? Is it looking like that's going in the next release?

Help me test 0.87.95-beta!

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.1655941

From that thread:


OSX package & signing is next on my list.  Then persistent blockchain stuff!  

Yeah, I already proceeded to burn an Ubuntu CD, but I'll try with the Win 98 first and let y'all know if it works. Gotta then make that paper backup right away as the over decade-old computer is making some interesting noises

I assume that Windows 98 is too old, but I have no evidence to back that up.  Please try the "windows_all.msi" file and let me know.  I just wouldn't count on it.  As long as it has 128 MB+ RAM, it can run Ubuntu 10.04-32bit, which can be setup in about 20 minutes, and all you need is the offline bundle.  It's possible even without any real linux experience.  But I'll let others comment on whether that's accurate.