The IOTA Foundation announced it is hiring the world leading lightweight cryptography and security company CYBERCRYPT ApS from Denmark to take the Curl cryptography to its next maturation phase.

CYBERCRYPT provides strong cryptographic protection and digital security for every device, even if the computing base is untrusted, by means of patent-pending cryptographic technologies immune to key extraction. Among other industries, CYBERCRYPT delivers cybersecurity solutions for both IoT and FinTech.

Founded by expert cryptographers, CYBERCRYPT makes over 15 years of extensive experience in cybersecurity and cryptography from all over the world available to corporations, startups, governments, and other organizations. Their team of the world’s leading specialists constantly strives to provide the best and most cost-effective security solutions to their customers. Resource efficiency is a crucial feature required for cryptography deployed on IoT devices.

CYBERCRYPT’s founder Andrey Bogdanov has co-designed such prominent lightweight cryptographic algorithms as PRESENT and SPONGENT — both internationally standardized by ISO/IEC. SPONGENT is a leading lightweight hash function in the sponge family that Curl also belongs to. PRESENT is considered the lightweight cryptographic primitive with more than 1500 citations.

He is also well-known for designing multiple other lightweight primitives schemes including Midori — the first symmetric crypto primitive specifically optimized for low energy consumption — and several dedicated lightweight schemes for authenticated encryption.

Andrey on joining this effort to audit and further develop Curl:

“CYBERCRYPT is excited to work towards making IOTA’s Distributed Ledger technologies more secure. We are happy to bring our expertise from the field of cryptographic design and cryptanalysis to perform a security evaluation of Curl-P. An interesting technical feature of the Curl-P hash function is that it is ternary. That is, its thorough analysis will involve adaptation of the standard cryptanalytic toolbox to the ternary case.”

The IOTA Foundation says they are naturally as excited to have world-leading cryptographers with specialized expertise in lightweight cryptography on board to ensure Curl’s viability.