By Tobi Loba
Within the blockchain industry, there are growing innovations that brought about technologies meant to proffer solutions in real-time. The world is beginning to embrace, or better still, adopt the services of the nascent technology blockchain, coupled with the overwhelming benefits embedded in it.
Among these growing technologies, IOTA happens to be at the forefront with the leaders in the blockchain industry, due to the utilities the project adds to its portfolio on a daily basis.
What is IOTA?
As inferred from Investopedia, IOTA is a distributed ledger invented for the purpose of recording and executing transactions between machines and devices in the internet of things (IoT) ecosystem.
A digital currency known as MIOTA is used by the ledger to account for transactions in its network. The innovation of IOTA is based on Tangle, a system of nodes applied for the confirmation of transactions.
Why is IOTA Quantum-secure?
Blockchain is a distributed database with cryptographic protection against malicious acts or manipulations. The blockchain platforms nowadays rely solely on digital signatures. These are, however, vulnerable to attacks by means of quantum computers.
As inferred from Iota News by Nala on Twitter, a large quantum computer could be very efficient enough to solve problems that need trial and error before a problem is solved. Such a problem can be related to the problem that surfaces while generating the Bitcoin block.
As for IOTA, the algorithm applied for its implementation is structured such that the time to find a nonce is not as much as the time needed to effect other necessary tasks in the issuance of a transaction.
So, for IOTA, the efficiency gain for an ideal quantum computer wouldn’t be a threat to the security of the Tangle, however, the reverse could play out for Bitcoin, as it could potentially be fatal as the fundamental security.
One of the features that seemingly makes IOTA standout is the use of hash-based signatures in place of the elliptic curve cryptographic (ECC).
IOTA leverages the speed of hash-based signatures. It also simplifies the overall protocol such as signing and verification better than the elliptic curve cryptographic (ECC). In a nutshell, the signature scheme of IOTA is quantum-secure because it uses Winternitz signatures, a one-time signature scheme.