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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 th

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 there, but I got the jist. What I don't get, is HOW this became a bipartisan issue with HN/Reddit. Because if you read the 124 pages, it becomes clear that both the IOTA team, as well as the MIT team were bad at communicating with each other, the purpose of this bad communication is unknown, but both are at fault. So we at HN look at some emails from IOTA and call out their unprofessional behavior, and Reddit does the same thing with MIT's team. What if someone has no perspective of how these communications usually take place? It looks like (upon the assumption that IOTA's team member was indeed in an 'incomprehensible' state when he typed that email out) MIT's team member without a second warning, just went ahead with publishing the paper. So what's the big mess? It's pretty clear that both parties messed by being sloppy at emailing each other.

charleslmunger 9y ago
The MIT team wasn't being sloppy, they were using standard terminology that anyone with a cryptography background would understand. The naive assumption on their part was that the development team of a major crypto currency understood decades-old cryptanalysis techniques that are covered in an introductory undergraduate course. I think there was some disbelief that a team with so much money could have made such an incredibly rookie mistake.
jkachmar 9y ago
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.
- generalizethis 9y ago
  Green is the only guy who could take something as novel as zsnarks and latch it onto a trusted setup (you need it, but it should have been 50 Peter Todds) and optional privacy. He trolled Monero with this same kind of vehemence when he should be turning his critical eye on zcash--so let's not pretend he's an infallible god when he can't even get his own project right. Also, if you read the side convo between CFB and Aumasson you'll get an indicator of why CFB was correct (also polite when someone intelligent listens).
  - Ar-Curunir 9y ago
    Lol this entire thread you've been defending Iota without facts. a) there's nothing broken in the Zcash cryptography. Some cryptographic assumptions used by SNARKs are a bit hairy and novel, but these assumptions, and variants there-of, haven't been broken in over 25 years of trying. b) State-of-the-art efficient SNARKs require trusted setup, but this can be distributed, as was done with Zcash and will be done, in a better way, in the next Zcash upgrade. c) CFB called Aumasson's methods 'primitive'. Hardly polite, especially considering Aumasson is co-creator of solid hash functions like Blake2.
    - generalizethis 9y ago
      - Fungibility is broken when you have optional privacy--also stuff like this happens http://jeffq.com/blog/on-the-linkability-of-zcash-transactions/ http://jeffq.com/blog/on-the-linkability-of-zcash-transactio... -No one but the participants should trust a trusted setup, and even then, it's only if they can vouch for their OPSEC. - B goes to my point that Green is inept as that should have been where they started. - And they were cordial after they talked through the issues and Aumasson reliezed CFB's point (also, appeal to authority backfires when the authority agrees with the person you are criticizing). Spend less time worrying about what I'm doing elsewhere and more on the argument in front of you. But it does seem fitting that you are supporting a dev who shows more concern for what others are doing than the product he helped drive into the ground.

charleslmunger 9y ago

The MIT team wasn't being sloppy, they were using standard terminology that anyone with a cryptography background would understand. The naive assumption on their part was that the development team of a major crypto currency understood decades-old cryptanalysis techniques that are covered in an introductory undergraduate course. I think there was some disbelief that a team with so much money could have made such an incredibly rookie mistake.

jkachmar 9y ago

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.

generalizethis 9y ago
Green is the only guy who could take something as novel as zsnarks and latch it onto a trusted setup (you need it, but it should have been 50 Peter Todds) and optional privacy. He trolled Monero with this same kind of vehemence when he should be turning his critical eye on zcash--so let's not pretend he's an infallible god when he can't even get his own project right. Also, if you read the side convo between CFB and Aumasson you'll get an indicator of why CFB was correct (also polite when someone intelligent listens).
- Ar-Curunir 9y ago
  Lol this entire thread you've been defending Iota without facts. a) there's nothing broken in the Zcash cryptography. Some cryptographic assumptions used by SNARKs are a bit hairy and novel, but these assumptions, and variants there-of, haven't been broken in over 25 years of trying. b) State-of-the-art efficient SNARKs require trusted setup, but this can be distributed, as was done with Zcash and will be done, in a better way, in the next Zcash upgrade. c) CFB called Aumasson's methods 'primitive'. Hardly polite, especially considering Aumasson is co-creator of solid hash functions like Blake2.
  - generalizethis 9y ago
    - Fungibility is broken when you have optional privacy--also stuff like this happens http://jeffq.com/blog/on-the-linkability-of-zcash-transactions/ http://jeffq.com/blog/on-the-linkability-of-zcash-transactio... -No one but the participants should trust a trusted setup, and even then, it's only if they can vouch for their OPSEC. - B goes to my point that Green is inept as that should have been where they started. - And they were cordial after they talked through the issues and Aumasson reliezed CFB's point (also, appeal to authority backfires when the authority agrees with the person you are criticizing). Spend less time worrying about what I'm doing elsewhere and more on the argument in front of you. But it does seem fitting that you are supporting a dev who shows more concern for what others are doing than the product he helped drive into the ground.