University College London (UCL) announces breakdown of relations with the IOTA Foundation

The Blockchain Technologies Center (CBT) of the University College London (UCL) has announced that it is no longer associated with the IOTA Foundation.

Through a statement posted on its website, the CBT explained that it has decided to sever ties with the foundation in support of open security research and the ability of researchers to carry out their work without the burden of the possibility of legal threats.

For the statement, states:

The UCL Center for Blockchain Technologies is no longer associated with the IOTA Foundation (...) We reaffirm our support for open security research, as a prerequisite to understanding the guarantees provided by any Blockchain-based technology. It is not appropriate for security researchers to be subject to threats of legal action to disclose their results.

While the statement does not explicitly mention the reason for the breakup, the decision probably has to do with the controversial dispute between IOTA and the MIT Digital Currency Initiative (DCI), which dates back to last July.

Last year, DCI researchers Neha Narula and Ethan Heilman published a vulnerability report detailing a broken hash function in IOTA that supposedly made the technology susceptible to "counterfeiting attacks by practical firms." Although the cryptocurrency base finally did not agree with the report, numerous cryptographers made claims by the DCI.

Since then, IOTA argued that the DCI did not comply with the appropriate vulnerability disclosure standards when reporting the problem. On the other hand, the foundation further questioned the authenticity of the vulnerability report, citing alleged conflicts of interest within the DCI. On the other hand, Narula of DNI has repeatedly denied all these accusations.

Also, in addition to finalizing its relationship with the foundation, it seems that UCL has also purged all entries in IOTA from the CBT website, since the page now returns a 404 error.