A computer science engineer at Michigan State University has a word of advice for the millions of bitcoin owners who use smartphone apps to manage their cryptocurrency: don’t.
Smartphone wallet apps make it easy to buy and trade cryptocurrency, a relatively new digital currency that can be challenging to understand in just about every way except one: It’s very clearly valuable.
The researchers showcased that app — the Bitcoin Security Rectifier — in a paper published for the Association for Computing Machinery’s Conference on Data and Application Security and Privacy.
“More than 90% of users are unaware of whether their wallet is violating this decentralized design principle based on the results of a user study,” Tu said.
He instead encourages users to manage their bitcoin using a computer — not a smartphone — and resources found on Bitcoin’s official website, bitcoin.org.
Most smartphone programs are written in a programming language called Java.
For example, they can help an attacker deduce all the Bitcoin addresses that wallet users have used to send or receive bitcoin.
Tu’s app is designed to run at the same time on the same phone as a wallet, where it monitors for signs of such intrusions.
The team is currently developing the app for Android phones and plans to have it available for download in the Google Play app store in the coming months.