IOTA Official Statement on the MIT-DCI Leaks

Official Statement Regarding the MIT-DCI Leaks

Back in January, the IOTA Foundation released a four-part blog post detailing the technical considerations of a vulnerability report published on GitHub in September 2017 by the Digital Currency Initiative (DCI), an organization affiliated with MIT.

Unfortunately, and much to everyone’s surprise, the communications between the IOTA team and DCI that occured prior to this report were recently leaked, and published on an external blog. We at the IOTA Foundation unequivocally condemn this leak. These were private communications between parties who did not consent to such release — the release of these emails without consent is detrimental to the IOTA Foundation, to our community, to our friends at the DCI with whom we maintain ongoing conversation (heated at times, to be sure, but such is the nature of a vibrant academic discussion) and to the entire DLT space.

Here's the 124 page long leak. Read through most of it, as well as the HackerNews/Reddit polarization and Twitter blitzkriegs that ensued, and am more and more coming to the conclusion that this is a case of cross departmental warfare between (if slightly arrogant) engineering types and narrowly fixated cryptographers -- cryptography is, after all and above all, highly mathematical, and cryptographers as such don't allow for even theoretical vulnerabilities no matter how or what particularly applies where, while practical folks that try to get shit done and get things off the ground may sometimes use heuristics and dirty fixes -- in the case of IOTA, it may not have been the most elegant solution, but it had been a (temporary) working solution with a specific (stated) purpose (although I too don't entirely comprehend the moment of sneaking ternary logic in cryptographic compression, but neither do I the highly special purpose machinery that uses that logic) - this is even, at the present stage in time, kind of a trademark/characteristic of how things are done with IOTA, if anybody cared to try working with it and explore the tangle in more detail. But that IS normal, and is why there is the Coo (Central Coordinator).

And instead of collaborative/constructive discussion this rather escalated into a shitstorm of embarrassing proportions, +I'm inclined to think there is a conflict of interests here -- if one weights out everything altogether -- which doesn't put the DCI in the best of spotlights (neither the IOTA team, but for reasons entirely different... one just simply shouldn't lose his cool in public like that, to begin with).