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Ease of use is one of the critical aspects of every cryptocurrency and although Monero can offer a wide range of privacy features it has to be usable and user-friendly to be used by a substantial margin of people. Usability in Monero is a long-term topic that sparks discussion [55]. While significant number of users reported that they perform back- ups of their wallet keys, many of them use hot wallet on their mobile phones which presents a security threat for their wallet. Following scenarios represent secure and easy to use instructions for a new Monero user, based on results from Monero user research in the Chapter 5.

6.1 Generating the keys and accessing the wallet

The first challenge for Monero users is generating key pairs and access- ing the wallet. This process varies from the user’s platform of choice and used wallet software. As the choice of client wallet software is important for Monero users in terms of user experience and security, the following Sections are dedicated to available wallet software.

6.1.1 Windows and Linux platform

The official client offers CLI and GUI wallet management and is avail- able athttps://getmonero.org/downloads/. Using this client users can generate wallet keys. Created keys are after generation saved directly into the memory of the device unless specified otherwise.

.\monero−wallet−cli.exe
Monero Lithium Luna (v0.12.3.0−release)
Logging to C:\Users\radim\Nextcloud\ssme−thesis\cli\monero−wallet−cli.log
Specify wallet file name (e.g., MyWallet). If the wallet
file is not present, it will be created.
Wallet file name (or Ctrl−C to exit): ssme−thesis
No wallet found with that name. Confirm creation of new
wallet named: ssme−thesis
(Y/Yes/N/No): Y
Generating new wallet...

Security of this task depends on the origin of the software, delivery chain trust, and the users’ operating system. Monero CLI and GUI binaries can be edited, and the application itself does not call any internal checking to alert the user of the unauthorized change. Code injection was successfully tested on GUI binary of the official Monero wallet as seen in the Figure 9.2. Although SHA256 hash is pro- vided on the website, the user is not specifically instructed to check the hashes of the downloaded software with tools like PowerShell using Get-FileHash ./monero-wallet-gui.exe | Format-Listcommand [56]. GPG-signed list of the hashes is available on the website although there are no instructions on how to verify PGP signature itself.

Algorithm : SHA256 Hash : AF9324151909AC7B9BC6D622210EADFBAE5E66... Path : ./monero−wallet−gui−original.exe

Algorithm : SHA256 Hash : DF4EC49E088284ECC78DBBD8B9CEFF00A78085... Path : ./monero−wallet−gui−injected.exe

6 Monero Usage and Storage Best Practices

There are also alternative approaches to key generation like an offline JavaScript based monero-wallet-generator that is available at github.com/moneromooo-monero/monero-wallet-generator.

Hardware way is considered to be in the development, but Monero compatible devices like Ledger Nano S are already on the market. The way how keys are generated in hardware wallets varies on firmware included in each device. In general, the wallet is required to have Monero application in- stalled from vendors application catalog. Keys are generated on the hardware device within the application itself, and the user can only export private view key from the device to view the balance in full CLI/GUI client. This way, the user has private spend key always on the device, and the client PC has only private view key. To sign a transaction, the user has to confirm the transaction on the device itself meaning the hardware wallet will sign the transaction and then sends it to the Monero client. By this, in case of a security breach on the host computer, there is no Monero to steal.

6.1.3 Wallet software for mobile devices

Monero has wallet software available for Android as well as the iOS platform. Community recommends to use the open source ones for both platforms, as their codebase is published on GitHub and everyone can inspect the code. Another common fact for the recommended solutions is that the keypairs for the wallet are stored exclusively on the user’s device and restore can be done without third-party technical support.

Monerojuro is an open source Android wallet application that is available on Google Play as well as APK release at Github. By this, users can install the application from the Google Play directly, man- ually download the APK or compile it from source code themselves. Wallet keys storage is based on the device only, and the application encourages users to back up their seed [57].

Monero Wallet is an application released by Freewallet.org that provides Monero wallets for both Android and iOS. Regarding overall usability, this application is easier for an average user as it does not present any cryptocurrency wallet terms as key, seed, etc. The user is instead instructed to create a Freewallet account which acts as a wallet [58]. By this, the user does not need to save the seed, wallet keys or make any backups as key management is completely on the side of the service provider, Freewallet.org. This fact is often emphasized in Monero community as the user that does not control the keys does not control the wallet. Also, the source code is not publicly available for the community to review.

Cake Wallet represents open source Monero wallet for iOS that provides wallet generation and local key pair storage with remote node connection and synchronization [59]. Guideline for secure wallet access is described in the Chapter 4.1.1.

6.2 Secure storage system

Wallet keys are everything when it comes to cryptocurrency usage. Who has the keys, controls the wallet and can view or transfer the balance to another address. If a user loses wallet keys, Monero wallet can still be recovered using mnemonic seed that should be saved on another storage medium. This Section describes possible ways of backing-up wallet keys. Primary storage media security is compared in the Figure 4.1.3.

Data characteristics

As described in the Section 4.1, Monero wallet consists of an encrypted wallet.keysfile that contains private spend and view keys. Size of this file is less than a few kilobytes. Another type of data that is presented to the user is mnemonic seed. Seed can be used for recovery when wallet file is lost and consists of 25 words with the last one being used for checksum. In total, Monero wallet requires less than 8 kilobytes for key and seed storage. This results in minimal space requirements for backup storage media.

Backup strategy

Best practice for backups that isn’t too demanding on the user side is the 3-2-1 strategy that is considered in the industry as a bare minimum for keeping the data safe [60].

  • 3 means having at least 3 copies of your data in total.
  • 2 of them are local but stored on different media types. - This can be represented as a combination of SSD and tape.
  • 1 is an offsite, geographically different location. - E.g., in the next building, a different facility, another city.

In short, this means when your building with external drive burns down and your notebook gets cryptolocker on the same day, you still have your data safe as you have them in the offsite location.

Data that users need to backup are not changing in the day to day usage, but only when the user creates a new or an additional wallet. Meaning that backing up the wallet does not need to be made frequently unlike other user data that are changed frequently, e.g., documents. Verification, on the other hand, is more important as not only users should back up the data, they should also be able to restore them. For ease of use, users can verify the integrity of the backup by actually recovering the wallet from the backup media.

  1. Monero Usage and Storage Best Practices

Recommended scheme

Following cost effectivity of individual media types together with common backup strategy:

  • Total number of copies of data: 5
  • The primary data source is on the client device with wallet soft- ware. This source is then copied downstream to backup media.
  • All copies of the data should be encrypted using file-level encryp- tion regardless of the security of the device, e.g., by a popular open-source tool like VeraCrypt.
  • Local copy - Located on disk with full volume encryption, e.g., by Bit- Locker. - Paper backup in a secure container at a hidden place.
  • Offsite copy - Located on the flash drive with full volume encryption. - Located on the DVD as an encrypted file. Secure Monero usage portal

As a result of this Chapter and Monero user research in the Chapter 5, all recommendations for secure Monero usage are compiled within one websitehttps://ownercz.github.io/ssme-thesis.

6.3 Study limitations

When interpreting Monero user and miners research results, the fol- lowing study limitations should be taken into account:

  • Self-selection bias of respondents in the dataset, which results in a non-representative sample of the population.
  • Reporting bias of responses in the dataset, as study gathers rather sensitive questions towards security habits and backups.
  • Limited time and reach of the questionnaires in the community that has participated in this research leading to non-representative population sample.