Security Guide - Pulsar-Coin/Pulsar-Coin-Cryptocurrency GitHub Wiki

Your wallet and funds are only as safe as the measures you take to ensure their security. The Pulsar wallet has many built-in security features available, but you need to use them. Many of these are already covered if you followed the Getting Started Guide. For best security it's recommended you take the following actions:

  1. Secure Your PC
  2. Encrypt Your Wallet
  3. Unlock For Staking Only
  4. Maintain a Secure Wallet Backup

Secure Your PC

There are many comprehensive guides for securing your PC and we won't try to recreate them here. Don't make it easier for your PC to be compromised, and protect it from unauthorized access both locally and over the network.

Encrypt Your Wallet

The first thing you should do after creating a new wallet is encrypt it. Encrypting the wallet file protects your secret keys so they can only be decrypted with a password. If your PC is compromised and the attacker obtains an unencrypted copy of your wallet, they have full access to your funds.

Windows GUI Wallet

  1. Go to the Settings menu, then choose "Encrypt Wallet...".

  2. Enter a secure password to encrypt your wallet, then click OK.

    NOTE: Be sure to keep your wallet password in a safe place. As the warning says, you will lose access to your PLSR if you forget it.

  3. When the wallet has been encrypted a mesage will appear, click OK to close the wallet.

  4. Click the Windows Start menu and run the Pulsar wallet again.

  5. When the wallet opens you will see a new message near the top ("Info: Staking suspended due to locked wallet.") as well as a lock icon at the bottom right. These confirm that your wallet is now encrypted and locked.

Linux CLI Wallet

  1. Encrypt your wallet with a passphrase:
./pulsar-cli encryptwallet "YOUR PASSPHRASE HERE"
  1. After encrypting your wallet pulsard is stopped, simply re-run the command from step 2 to restart it:
./pulsard --daemon --server --banscore=10000

Unlock For Staking Only

In order to send PLSR or stake your wallet balance your wallet must be unlocked. However, leaving your wallet unlocked can be a security risk if someone gains access to your PC. If your wallet is unlocked someone could send all the PLSR from your wallet without a password.

A safer option is to unlock for staking only, which still requires a password to send PLSR.

Windows GUI Wallet

  1. Go to the Help menu and click "Debug window..."

  2. Click the Console tab. In the text box at the bottom type walletpassphrase "YourWalletPasswordHere" 96000000 true and hit Enter.

  3. You should now see that "unlocked_staking_only" is set to true.

Linux CLI Wallet

  1. You can unlock your wallet for staking only with the following command:
./pulsar-cli walletpassphrase "YOUR PASSPHRASE HERE" 96000000 true
  1. You can view the status of your wallet with this command:
./pulsar-cli getwalletinfo

Look at the value for "unlocked_staking_only". If it's unlocked for staking only it will be true, if it's unlocked for staking and transactions it will be false.

{
  "walletname": "wallet.dat",
  "walletversion": 159900,
  "balance": 0.000000,
  "unconfirmed_balance": 0.000000,
  "immature_balance": 0.000000,
  "txcount": 0,
  "keypoololdest": 1646928903,
  "keypoolsize": 1000,
  "keypoolsize_hd_internal": 1000,
  "unlocked_until": 1647889297,
  "unlocked_staking_only": true,
  "hdmasterkeyid": "60f90fca29c58fb1b43d4adfb8b68d62e552948a"
}

Maintain a Secure Wallet Backup

Securing your PC and encrypting your wallet won't help if you still have an unencrypted wallet backup or if you're storing your encrypted wallet backup in an insecure location.

First, make sure you encrypt your wallet before backing it up for the first time. If you already have an unencrypted backup make a new encrypted backup and securely delete the unencrypted backup. (See Windows Backup Guide)

Second, store your wallet backup in a secure location. Often a dedicated USB drive is sufficient, although you should consider storing it in a different physical location than your PC in case both are destroyed/stolen.