Mist
A security audit of Mist
In 2016-17 the Ethereum Foundation hired @cure53berlin for a security Audit of Mist. The process was eye opening and contributed to the discontinuation of the project. The report was never publicized but it might still be valuable for builders today. Mist was a brainchild of Gavin and Jeff but I took the lead of it when I joined the foundation in 2014. We had grand plans for it being the realization of all web3 technologies we were building and it was planned as the main software release of Metropolis However the first 2 years I worked on Ethereum we were mostly focused on the Wallet app, so it started being released as a beta in 2016 and we started a security audit at the same time. The…
Sunsetting Mist
What’s ahead for our team
Personally it feels like yesterday, but I’ve been working on Mist for over four years. While I’m proud of all the accomplishments we achieved in this time advancing the usability of Ethereum and sharing a vision for web3, we feel Mist, the browser has outlived it’s usefulness: the ecosystem has matured so much that now the user has tons of great options of wallets and browsers on both mobile and desktop. At the same time, the message of how crypto can make a better web has reached so far that now great names like Samsung, Opera and Brave are all focused on integrating web3 features on their roadmap. Not all were roses, and in our way we faced some extreme security challenges that forced us…
How to build server less applications for Mist
Ethereum is not meant to be a platform to build esoteric smart contract applications that require a STEM degree to understand, but it aims to be one pillar of a different architecture for applications on the world wide web. With this post we will try to elucidate how this can be done and give some basic examples on how to start building a decentralized app. Who is this for? This text is intended at those who have a basic understanding of web technology and how to build a simple javascript and html app, and want to convert these skills into building apps for the Ethereum ecosystem. How can apps run without servers? Currently servers in web apps do much more than what they were originally…