Armory - Discussion Thread

[oakpacific]

This may have been asked before, but is there nothing can be done to mitigate the one hour freeze of my laptop whenever I start Armory?

Does it freeze?  I should run but be in offline mode.  If your laptop is lower on the RAM spectrum, then I suppose it can take a while...

I'm starting on the RAM reduction stuff this week.  I have no idea how long it's going to take, but I expect a week or two.  Then you shouldn't have these problems anymore.

Nah, it's online, freezes in the reading blockchain part. My laptop has got 5G of RAM, not sure how much is freely available at the time I started it though.

I assume you're running 0.87.2?  Before 0.8-something, I didn't have multi-threaded blockchain operations, which meant that it froze for everyone when it started up.  But that was a while ago, I assume you have the latest...

Yes, 0.87.2, so if it's all gonna be resolved in 0.88 I am definitely gonna compile it right, I was just too lazy to install that many additional packages.

Come on Alan, you got too good a memory.

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[etotheipi]

Yeah, I should've been focusing on things that were higher priority...  but I didn't want to run off down the persistent-blockchain path until I had the auto-bitcoind stuff mostly out of the way.  So instead, I've implemented a feature I've been meaning to do for quite a while!

All unlock dialogs now have an "On-Screen Display" keyboard!  Simple, off-the-shelf keyloggers won't be of much use if you're using an OSD keyboard.  And while it's probably not worth it, I added a "scramble" option so that you can feel ultra safe, even if the keylogger is recording mouse clicks (but not screenshots).  I say it's probably not worth it, because it's a cool idea, but it's a total pain in the ass to use!   It's almost intolerable, especially if you have a 16-character password like I do!  I'm sure someone will use it, though

The managesatoshi branch now reflects 0.87.95, and probably going to move towards merging this into the testing branch.  Some people have had some bad experiences with it, but I think the solution is to have a trouble-shooting webpage to help people get over it.  There's only some much time I can spend debugging this!

[CBit]

I read somewhere that XP is the oldest Windows compatible with Armory but can't find that info anymore, am I correct? Apparently that old computer growing old without use had Windows 98 installed instead of XP, jesus. Do I need to install another OS? Naturally talking about the offline use.

[etotheipi]

I read somewhere that XP is the oldest Windows compatible with Armory but can't find that info anymore, am I correct? Apparently that old computer growing old without use had Windows 98 installed instead of XP, jesus. Do I need to install another OS? Naturally talking about the offline use.

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.

[CBit]

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

[etotheipi]

Help me test 0.87.95-beta!

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=156250.msg1655941#msg1655941

From that thread:

Updates in 0.87.95-testing (soon to be 0.88)

• Auto management of bitcoind: This most definitely will break on OSX... gonna deal with that this week.  What needs to be done should be fairly well-explained in the interface.  I will be adding a troubleshooting section to the website to catch the most common issues.
• Notifications of new Bitcoin-Qt/bitcoind versions:  It should work with both self-management and auto-management of bitcoind.
• Windows code-signing certificates:  Just like my GPG keys, I have an offline code-signing certificate just for Windows installers/MSIs

• On-screen Keyboard for passphrase entry: You can now fool keyloggers by using an on-screen keyboard.  If you're ultra-paranoid (and ultra-patient) you can use a keyboard that is scrambled in a cryptographically secure manner.   Comes in "regular" and "insane" flavors.
• Clickable (?) objects: Yes, they finally do something when you click them (used to be 1.5s mouseover)
• Reduced the number of windows you have to click through to execute an offline transaction.
• Created new Ubuntu-10.04-32bit offline bundle:  this includes the frag/unfrag scripts for Shamir's Secret Sharing

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

[chrisrico]

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?

[CBit]

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.

[etotheipi]

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.

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!

Would I be able to put my wallet on a network share then be able to access the wallet from multiple computers? Send and receive BTC this way also? If possible, would this raise issues in corrupting the wallet? 

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.

[Nemesis]

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)?

[etotheipi]

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)?

"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!

[oakpacific]

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?

[etotheipi]

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?

What do you mean?  It's one page back:  https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=56424.msg1761230#msg1761230

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

[oakpacific]

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?

What do you mean?  It's one page back:  https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=56424.msg1761230#msg1761230

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

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

[etotheipi]

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?

What do you mean?  It's one page back:  https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=56424.msg1761230#msg1761230

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

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

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.

[etotheipi]

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=<X, in MB>" 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.

[oakpacific]

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

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.

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

[etotheipi]

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

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.

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

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.

[bit365]

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

[etotheipi]

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

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 <alt>-printscrn or <ctrl>-printscrn and it will put the window in focus on your clipboard which you can then copy into another application.