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Cryptographic vulnerabilities in IOTA

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Re: Cryptographic vulnerabilities in IOTA

#31

Post by rodarmor »

maxerickson wrote: post #27
rodarmor wrote: post #23

IOTA is trash for this and other reasons. You should short it. Issues: 1. Double spends are devastating and easy, since they permanently split the tangle. 2. With no transaction limit, syncing from the beginning of time will take forever. 3. With no transaction limit, keeping up with network traffic will be impossible. (Especially on IoT devices. 4a. Nobody is going to use power and die space on IoT devices for the P…

Is there a reliable exchange offering reliable short contracts?

IOTA is traded on Bitfinex, which I think allows shorting, although I've never done it.

One thing to keep in mind though is that the market is not particularly rational, so even though I think IOTA is doomed in the long term, in the short term it could go up, because markets. So if you do decide to short, make sure to figure out what degree of leverage is important, and what your appetite for risk is.

Re: Cryptographic vulnerabilities in IOTA

#32

Post by jameskegel »

DennisP wrote: post #28
tptacek wrote: post #14

The thing that I think should really worry you is that the reaction among the professional cryptographers to this (or at least the dozens I talk to on Slack and Twitter) is "well, that's cryptocurrency for you". If you have the impression that serious cryptographers are knee deep in the problem space of trying to make sure cryptocurrencies are actually secure, revise your expectations.

The ZCash team is pretty serious: https://z.cash/team.html

To a higher degree, one should note the Monero Research Lab is leaps and bounds ahead of ZCash.

Re: Cryptographic vulnerabilities in IOTA

#33

Post by StavrosK »

rodarmor wrote: post #24
swordswinger12 wrote: post #9

Does anyone know if the IOTA devs ever wrote down a justification for using a hand-rolled hash instead of, like, SHA-256? If so, can you link it in a comment? EDIT: I feel compelled to explicitly say that this was a mind-bogglingly stupid thing to do, and there is almost no way to justify it. I'm just curious what they thought they were accomplishing.

The IOTA devs are deluded. Here's there justification: "Creating a new cryptographic hash function is no trivial undertaking, even when it is being built on preexisting world class standards. “Don’t roll your own crypto” is a compulsory uttered mantra that serves as a good guiding principle for 99.9% of projects, but there are exceptions to the rule. When spearheading technology for a new paradigm this statement is n…

"Or, sometimes, back."

Re: Cryptographic vulnerabilities in IOTA

#35

Post by baby »

jameskegel wrote: post #32
DennisP wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ZCash team is pretty serious: https://z.cash/team.html

To a higher degree, one should note the Monero Research Lab is leaps and bounds ahead of ZCash.

How? Honest question. I'm more familiar with the cryptographers behind Zcash.

Re: Cryptographic vulnerabilities in IOTA

#36

Post by baby »

tptacek wrote: post #14

The thing that I think should really worry you is that the reaction among the professional cryptographers to this (or at least the dozens I talk to on Slack and Twitter) is "well, that's cryptocurrency for you". If you have the impression that serious cryptographers are knee deep in the problem space of trying to make sure cryptocurrencies are actually secure, revise your expectations.

Dan Boneh has a course on the subject https://crypto.stanford.edu/cs251/

Lots of cryptographers hate cryptocurrencies, lots of them don't. Alessandro Chiesa is being Zcash for example.

Re: Cryptographic vulnerabilities in IOTA

#37

Post by tptacek »

baby wrote: post #36
tptacek wrote: post #14

The thing that I think should really worry you is that the reaction among the professional cryptographers to this (or at least the dozens I talk to on Slack and Twitter) is "well, that's cryptocurrency for you". If you have the impression that serious cryptographers are knee deep in the problem space of trying to make sure cryptocurrencies are actually secure, revise your expectations.

Dan Boneh has a course on the subject https://crypto.stanford.edu/cs251/ Lots of cryptographers hate cryptocurrencies, lots of them don't. Alessandro Chiesa is being Zcash for example.

I'm not trying to say cryptographers hate all cryptocurrencies, but I get why it sounded like that.

Re: Cryptographic vulnerabilities in IOTA

#38

Post by DennisP »

jameskegel wrote: post #32
DennisP wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ZCash team is pretty serious: https://z.cash/team.html

To a higher degree, one should note the Monero Research Lab is leaps and bounds ahead of ZCash.

I'm not competent to compare the work, but there don't appear to be any professional academic cryptographers on either the core or research lab teams.

https://getmonero.org/resources/people.html

Whereas the ZCash team includes several people who were well-known cryptographers before ZCash came along.

Re: Cryptographic vulnerabilities in IOTA

#39

Post by Zarath »

swordswinger12 wrote: post #9

Does anyone know if the IOTA devs ever wrote down a justification for using a hand-rolled hash instead of, like, SHA-256? If so, can you link it in a comment? EDIT: I feel compelled to explicitly say that this was a mind-bogglingly stupid thing to do, and there is almost no way to justify it. I'm just curious what they thought they were accomplishing.

The justification can be found on the Reddit:

"Because we needed an efficient hash function for IoT and the future of ternary computing (memristors, spintronics, optical computing and the trend in Artificial Neural Networks)

This has been known since before we even began the project. I spoke with the Keccak team about this all the way back in early 2015 before a code of IOTA was written"

Source: https://gyazo.com/03cacbaf9de433c544eaffb8fd1c92ef

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