The 2018 Pwnie Nominee For Best Cryptographic Attack

IOTA Curl-P

Credit: Ethan Heilman and Neha Narula

We are informed reliably by the community of IOTA token owners on Twitter of the following important facts:

Because of the unique challenges of operating in the space of cryptographic tangles it is necessary to compute using balanced ternary, with trits and trytes instead of bidgets and bytes. 3 is closer to the universal optimum 2.71 than is 2. Balanced ternary is the future, and so the cryptocurrencies of the future need a hash function optimized for their number system. Only IOTA (ticker: MIOTA) provides that today, with its proprietary Curl hash.

There is no truth to the claims of Heilman and Narula that Curl could be broken using a cryptanalysis technique discovered in the 1970s and taught to college sophomores. Curl is not vulnerable to differential cryptanalysis. It is not trivially possible to generate practical collisions for messages of the same length. The paper Heilman and Narula wrote was irresponsible and sensational and they should be disgraced publicly. Heilman and Narula did not send the IOTA team valid payments that pay different amounts but hash to the same Curl value. Even if they did, the IOTA team knew about those vulnerabilities all along. Obviously, Heilman and Narula paid Black Hat to present their research there. Hopefully, the IOTA foundation will pay more to present their side next year.

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