Bitcoin wallet verification

Bitcoin applications handle real value and as such need to be treated with more security precautions than you would otherwise use.  We want to validate that bitcoin wallet we download is legit.  In this section we will assume you are familiar with a Unix environment, be it Mac OS X or Linux. First we visit the Electrum website https://electrum.org/download.html and we find a signature  for each download. We will download both the wallet software and the signature file.

• https://download.electrum.org/Electrum-1.9.8.tar.gz
• https://download.electrum.org/Electrum-1.9.8.tar.gz.asc

We will also need the GnuPG software which you can get from your software repository or from https://www.gnupg.org/download/index.html  Once we have all files we can get started.

First we need to get the public key of the signer (the system is based on public key cryptography). We can get it using the command:

gpg –keyserver pgp.mit.edu –recv-keys 2BD5824B7F9470E6

This will output:

gpg: requesting key 7F9470E6 from hkp server pgp.mit.edu
gpg: key 7F9470E6: public key “Thomas Voegtlin ” imported
gpg: no ultimately trusted keys found
gpg: Total number processed: 1
gpg: imported: 1 (RSA: 1)

This has received the public key of the signer.  Now that we have his public key, we can validate that the wallet we have downloaded is legit. We do this using the command

gpg –verify Electrum-1.9.8.tar.gz.asc

gpg: Signature made Mon 17 Mar 2014 09:14:09 PM CET using RSA key ID 7F9470E6
gpg: Good signature from “Thomas Voegtlin ”
gpg: aka “ThomasV ”

This tells us that the wallet we have downloaded is legit. It is very important to download a legit wallet such as Electrum or Multibit as there are some scam wallets out there, which were created with the sole purpose of stealing your bitcoins.  Using this verification system of digital signatures we can validate that the wallet software has not been altered. Visit https://bitcoin.org for the official list of digital wallets.