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Email exchange between MIT Media Lab and the IOTA Foundation [pdf]

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Re: Email exchange between MIT Media Lab and the IOTA Foundation [pdf]

#131

Post by jkachmar »

reallymental wrote: post #101

I'm a person with no background in cryptography. I am in the tech industry however, so I can follow about 30% of the technical jargon that's going on. I read the entire thing. smh. The whole thing started with someone finding something wrong with the 'Curl' wrapper around a packet that's being sent from A->B. Apparently, this violates a EU-CMA security protocol, and this is an issue. Lots of holes in my knowledge the…

The way I view it there's a serious asymmetry here in that the IOTA team is denigrating seasoned professionals in the field of cryptography (e.g. Matthew Green) on social media without offering a serious rebuttal of their concerns.

From my PoV there seems to be little-to-no miscommunication in bad faith on the part of the MIT researchers in these emails, but a lot of dismissiveness from the IOTA developers towards the concerns that were brought to them.

Over the past few days, it seems to have only gotten worse on Twitter (I encourage you to check out the recent threads in which @matthew_d_green engages with @c___f___b only to be accused of professional incompetence).

tl;dr (from my perspective) is that the big mess here comes from a party without proper education in the field producing a $1B+ market cap cryptocurrency while _unnecessarily rolling their own crypto primitives_, and then steadfastly ignoring the suggestions academics who have spent their entire lives researching this field.

Re: Email exchange between MIT Media Lab and the IOTA Foundation [pdf]

#132

Post by wybiral »

killerstorm wrote: post #114
kylegalbraith wrote: post #49

I can't believe I read that entire train wreck front to back. If IOTA published this to "expose" MIT, it does quite the opposite. Rule number one, all together now, don't roll your own crypto.

It actually worked. People who are clueless about cryptography (i.e. like 99% of crypto investors) are totally on IOTA side here. Invancheglo is a grade A troll.

I've noticed that too. They seem to have a decent army of people spreading nonsense on social media right now.

If you post something negative about IOTA you're likely to get a bunch of troll responses from accounts with histories of nothing but IOTA-related likes, retweets, and responses.

Re: Email exchange between MIT Media Lab and the IOTA Foundation [pdf]

#133

Post by Ar-Curunir »

mikeash wrote: post #125
Ar-Curunir wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? Modern cryptography is based on proofs and definitions. Sure, we can't prove that SHA2 is cryptographically-strong (that imply P≠NP), but we can show that it resists certain kinds of attacks. Furthermore, assuming certain properties are satisfied by SHA2, we can order that different constructions based on it (eg a Merkle tree) are secure. Cryptography is highly mathematical.

I’m talking about proofs that the stuff works, i.e. that the algorithms or code are cryptographically strong. As far as I know, only the one-time pad has such a proof.

As I said, proving that the underlying crypto is unbreakable would involving proving statements stronger than P≠NP, and so isn't going to happen for a while. What you can do is conjecture that your favourite hardness assumption (SHA-256 is a CRH, AES is a PRF, factorisation is not in P) holds, and then base your cryptographic constructions off such assumptions.

Re: Email exchange between MIT Media Lab and the IOTA Foundation [pdf]

#134

Post by EthanHeilman »

KKKKkkkk1 wrote: post #81

As a participant in the SHA hash function contest who broke one of the 51 Round-1 SHA-3 proposals and who worked on security proofs for another SHA-3 proposal I can say with some authority that using the sponge construction and showing statistical properties of the transformation function is not sufficient to ensure security. Of the 51 Round-1 SHA-3 proposals all of them passed statistical tests and at least one roun…

"Of the 51 Round-1 SHA-3 proposals all of them passed statistical tests and at least one round of review by NIST yet 33/51 were broken."

My central point is that statistical tests are not in anyway sufficient for showing the security of a cryptographic hash function since it is easy to create a hash function that passes them and is broken. My evidence was the SHA-3 competition.

Re: Email exchange between MIT Media Lab and the IOTA Foundation [pdf]

#135

Post by atomical »

jeffshek wrote: post #85
mbgaxyz wrote: post #44

Interesting to see the range of opinions about IOTA. The conclusions on HN are (so far) completely at odds from those on the cryptocurrency subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/7zztey/full... Meanwhile the commercial world seems happy to engage with IOTA: "Volkswagen CDO will join the supervisory board of the IOTA foundation. And now, Volkswagen is going to utilise this technology in their auto…

Everyone that posts in r/cryptocurrency has an agenda (including myself). Most of the posts there are ways of confirmation biases - it's very difficult to get someone to see what they don't want to see in his/her cryptocurrency. There are certain coins that are exceptionally polarizing (Ripple and IOTA come to mind) - it leads to this my coin vs your coin behavior. It's so fascinating, yet odd at the same time. I rea…

Check out the book Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain. It's written by a skeptic.

Re: Email exchange between MIT Media Lab and the IOTA Foundation [pdf]

#136

Post by mikeash »

Ar-Curunir wrote: post #133
mikeash wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m talking about proofs that the stuff works, i.e. that the algorithms or code are cryptographically strong. As far as I know, only the one-time pad has such a proof.

As I said, proving that the underlying crypto is unbreakable would involving proving statements stronger than P≠NP, and so isn't going to happen for a while. What you can do is conjecture that your favourite hardness assumption (SHA-256 is a CRH, AES is a PRF, factorisation is not in P) holds, and then base your cryptographic constructions off such assumptions.

I understand that. Starting with a conjecture and "proving" your algorithm's security based on that is not actually a solid proof. This is why things are the way I said they are.

Re: Email exchange between MIT Media Lab and the IOTA Foundation [pdf]

#137

Post by IntronExon »

flyGuyOnTheSly wrote: post #11
IntronExon wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One priceless line from Ethan Heilman to support that observation: Probably best not to use informal stackoverflow answers and Wikipedia for understanding the security of your system. Yowza.

IOTA is one of the only crypto currencies in the green today, however. Which is the real "yowza" imho.

Did you also invest in Juicero? How about Magic Leap? Enron?

Being in the green just means you’ve convinced a critical mass of greedy, ignorant people that you’re a winner.

Re: Email exchange between MIT Media Lab and the IOTA Foundation [pdf]

#138

Post by whymauri »

IntronExon wrote: post #137
flyGuyOnTheSly wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IOTA is one of the only crypto currencies in the green today, however. Which is the real "yowza" imho.

Did you also invest in Juicero? How about Magic Leap? Enron? Being in the green just means you’ve convinced a critical mass of greedy, ignorant people that you’re a winner.

What's wrong with Magic Leap? Just curious, I've never heard anything negative.

Re: Email exchange between MIT Media Lab and the IOTA Foundation [pdf]

#139

Post by generalizethis »

mbgaxyz wrote: post #44

Interesting to see the range of opinions about IOTA. The conclusions on HN are (so far) completely at odds from those on the cryptocurrency subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/7zztey/full... Meanwhile the commercial world seems happy to engage with IOTA: "Volkswagen CDO will join the supervisory board of the IOTA foundation. And now, Volkswagen is going to utilise this technology in their auto…

Could it be that HN is filled with early adopter money anxious to portray a threat in the worst light possible?

Re: Email exchange between MIT Media Lab and the IOTA Foundation [pdf]

#140

Post by generalizethis »

eastWestMath wrote: post #122
smrtfkkr wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sonstebo isn't a developer and the conversation continued well after this. What is your point.

My point is it’s funny. It’s a group of charlatans dealing with a competent person for the first time.

He's not an MIT researcher AFAIK. He's affiliated with DCI, which runs under the MIT banner. MIT actually had a favorable article in their review that DCI took issue with--but of course they were both going after a Swedish contract to create an e-money. IOTA survived the cut, which probably infuriates them even more.
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