Introduction

IOTA Stronghold is a secure software implementation with the sole purpose of isolating digital secrets from exposure to hackers and accidental leaks. It uses encrypted snapshots that can be easily backed up and securely shared between devices. Written in stable rust, it has strong guarantees of memory safety and process integrity.

There are four main components of Stronghold: 1. Client: The high-level interface to Stronghold (prefers Riker, functional integration also available) 2. Engine: Combines a persistence store (Snapshot) with an in-memory state interface (Vault). 3. Runtime: Is a process fork with limited permissions within which cryptographic operations take place 4. Communication: Enables Strongholds in different processes or on different devices to communicate with each other securely.

Read more about the Alpha Release.

WARNING

These libraries are being prepared for a number of external security audits in early 2021, so they are not yet verifiably safe. Until this warning is removed, the IOTA Foundation makes no guarantees to the fitness of these libraries for any purposes.

As such, they are to be seen as experimental and not ready for real-world applications.

Nevertheless, we are very interested in feedback about the design and implementation, and encourage you to reach out with any concerns or suggestions you may have.

Roadmap

Here are some of the features and tasks that we are working on.

Components

• [x] Engine
• [x] Client (with dual interfaces)
• [x] peer-to-peer communications
• [x] Secure runtime zone
• [x] Integration with crypto.rs

Documentation and Specification

• [ ] User Handbooks
• [ ] Specification Documentation
• [ ] Tutorials

Performance and Testing

• [x] Unit Tests
• [x] Lowlevel Library Fuzzing
• [ ] Realworld tests
• [x] Multiplatform benchmarks
• [ ] Continuous Fuzzing

Applications

• [x] CLI binary
• [ ] Standalone Desktop Application
• [ ] Portable Daemon (for nodes, etc)
• [ ] Dynamic high-performance store
• [ ] C FFI bindings

Hardware Integrations

• [x] Works with USB Armory Mk II
• [ ] Works with Yubikey
• [ ] Works with Ledger Nano X
• [ ] Use Secure Element to generate private keys for decryption
• [ ] Move entirely to FPGA

API Reference

cargo doc --workspace --no-deps --open

Running Tests

cargo test --all

Joining the discussion

If you want to get involved in discussions about this technology, or you're looking for support, go to the #stronghold-discussion channel on Discord.

If you wish to join the Stronghold X-Team, please fill out this form.