IOTA Has a €200k Bounty for Hackers Who Can Crack their New Hash Function

The IOTA Foundation announced on December 20, 2018 they have released a new hash function they are calling Troika. Besides the release of the new hash function, designed by expert cryptographers from Cybercrypt, a leading cyber-security firm, IOTA is also offering €200,000 ($220,000) in bounty rewards to anyone able to crack the new hash function.

For those who aren’t too familiar with hash functions and how they work, a hash function encrypts data and then maps it to some identifier at a similar size each time. In the blockchain world this equates to your public and private keys.

Hash functions only work in one direction so it shouldn’t be possible to determine the original data from the hash. In the case of cryptocurrencies such a flaw would put your private keys at risk from hackers who could reverse engineer public keys and steal your funds.

With the new Troika hash function IOTA claims it can overcome any current cryptoanalytic attacks. That’s not to say it is unhackable, and IOTA hasn’t made that claim because nothing is completely unhackable, given enough computing power or time.

IOTA has hopes that their new hash function will provide a cryptographic foundation for encrypting the distributed ledger it calls the Tangle in the production protocol launched to power the Internet of Things ecosystem.

Hackers Encouraged to Break the Code

To prove the security of the new hash function, and to discover any potential bugs or flaws, IOTA has offered a $220,000 bounty for anyone who can crack the hash function. According to David Sønstebø, the co-founder of the IOTA Foundation,

We hope that this competition will bring the cryptographic community together on solving security in the Internet-of-Things.

The bounty program consists of two different challenges. One is the discovery of a “collision” and the other involves finding a “preimage”.

In a collisions attack a hacker tries to find two identical input variables that will produce the same hash value. In a preimage attack hackers take the reverse course and try to reverse engineer a hash value to its original data.

Obviously either attack, if successfully carried out, is a major security flaw in the hashing function.

They break the €200,000 bounty down into several prizes. For the collisions challenge those range from €1 to €20,000, while the bounties for the preimage challenge range from €200 to €35,000. Winners can also have their prize money paid out in MIOTA if they prefer once the hack is confirmed by Cybercrypt.

The new hash function comes just days after IOTA announced their positive collaboration with German automaker Audi.

Obviously this isn’t for everyone, but those who have programming skills could get their New Year off to a cracking start with this IOTA bounty program! Will you be trying to crack IOTA‘s code? Let us know if you are by commenting below.