Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Aledgerly 3118 days ago
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...

3 comments

SHA-3 is not an NSA standard. It was invented by Guido Bertoni, Joan Daemen, Michaƫl 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.

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

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