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Comment by Buttes | Hacker News Reader

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Buttes·

It gets better... their "improved" version of "curl"? Kerl.

You can't make this shit up.

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kerl comes from the fact it wraps & extends keccack hashing library. So the name is actually quite fitting.

Kerl is Keccak I.E. SHA-3, the international NSA standard. They called it Kerl for fun in homage of Curl, which is still under active development with the absolute world-leading cryptographers of lightweight cryptography. Curl had to be invented to push LIGHTWEIGHT cryptography which is necessary for the Internet of Things. It's quite astonishing how much misinformation is spread around.

https://blog.iota.org/iota-foundation-hires-cybercrypt-615d2...

I am very curious about what 'LIGHTWEIGHT' cryptography is defined as. I am also dubious about anyone that claims to have 'absolute world-leading cryptographers' since many strong cryptographers are quietly employed by intelligence agencies and most others are academics.

Also, since we are being pedantic, SHA-3/Keccak is an NIST standard, which is a federal agency of the United States.

I'm not an expert in the field, but there certainly have been efforts here and there to make "lightweight" crypto that needs little computational resources (and therefore battery power). One example would be KASUMI[0].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KASUMI

SHA-3 is not an NSA standard. It was invented by Guido Bertoni, Joan Daemen, Michaël Peeters and Gilles Van Assche who are researchers at various companies/universities and are from Italy and Belgium.

Your curl function is not even listed as one of the major lightweight crypto primitive on Lux' zoo: https://www.cryptolux.org/index.php/Lightweight_Hash_Functio...

Your post is full of shit.

This kind of post doesn't work when cryptographers read it.

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