University College London (UCL) has officially terminated its cooperation with the Fund IOTA in response to legal threats made by the Fund IOTA to address cybersecurity researchers.
Patrick Maccari (Patrick McCorry), research fellow at University College London, specializing in cryptography and decentralized systems, presented an official statement UCL, which stressed that researchers should not become victims of judicial processes because of their findings. Maccari also appealed to other universities and colleges, advising them to follow the example of UCL and to end the relationship with foundations that threaten researchers with lawsuits.
“Center blockchain technology UCL no longer associated with the Fund IOTA. In connection with the most recent news, we reiterate our support for open research in the field of security as necessary conditions for understanding the safeguards provided by any blockchain technology. It is unacceptable that security researchers have been threatened legal action because of the disclosure of the results of their work”, — says the official statement from UCL.
We will remind that in February, Ethan Heilman (Ethan Heilman) from Boston University together with a group of researchers from the Digital Currency Initiative (DCI) published a report revealing the lack of a hash function IOTA called Curl.
She was vulnerable for the method of breaking hash functions, called differential cryptanalysis. With this method, the attacker can destroy assets or steal them.
Almost immediately after the release of the report, the co-founder of IOTA Ivancioglo Sergey (Sergey Ivancheglo) stated in social networks that the team of lawyers working to file a lawsuit against the researchers.
Dan Guido (Dan Guido), CEO of the research company, specializing in security, Trail of Bits, told the Bake Morgen (Morgen Peck) from the Institute of electrical and electronics engineers (IEEE) that e-mails sent to a Fund IOTA, confused participants in the project because they did not feel the desire of the Foundation to improve your project and eliminate discovered vulnerabilities.
“It seems to me that these letters IOTA put in an awkward position. Anyone who reads, will see that IOTA is not enough technical leadership or just a Mature approach to work on their product,” said Guido.
However, in an interview with CCN, the Fund IOTA stated that he never threatened the researchers and stimulating research in the cryptocurrency sector. More importantly, the Fund IOTA noted that, although Sergei Ivancioglo is co-founder of IOTA, but he is not in any way associated with the Foundation IOTA. At the end of February Ivancioglo wrote in his blog:
“First of all, I would like to clarify that the Fund IOTA here at anything, it’s a personal matter between me and He. This is an important detail, and in the future, when you talk about it, mention this fact, please.”
When CCN asked for comments to the IOTA Foundation, the organization has supported the statement of the founder of the IOTA David Senstive (David Sønstebø), which read:
“100% agree with you. I totally condemn such acts, and the Fund IOTA has repeatedly condemned them. However, it is also unacceptable and the dissemination of false information, which deals with Patrick Mccorry to their advantage. An unfortunate side effect of the huge potential of this technology, the distributed registry and one of its applications (crypto) is a constant competition between projects for the net profit, which is now imbued with all this space.”
It is curious that before the beginning of the conflict between Ivancioglo and Heilman, in September last year he Senstube wrote a very unflattering letter to the Director of Digital Currency Initiative at the MIT Media Lab in Neha Narula (Neha Narula). He wondered in his mind the researcher and stated that it showed the “unprofessional behavior “academics” that he had ever seen.”
