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What’s even worse is that they claimed the flaws were deliberate, and a method of ‘copy protection’, where the flaws were somehow avoided in their full codebase but would cause any competitor that copied their open source code to suffer the flaws.

Smells like a BS excuse to me, and if true, perhaps an even bigger red flag as it strikes me as a very unethical move that is antithetical to open source ideology.

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Just to be clear, for the vulnerabilities DCI found to be exploited, the victim has to practically give away their private key at which point the descibed attack is moot.

IOTAs developer CFB has used this kind of copy protection for hen he developed NXT and his entire history is littered with arguing for putting a copy protection in place. His argument for putting that in place is any legitimate developer would review the code for vulnerabilities and kinks b fore implementation and only those trying to plagiarize the work would literally copy paste the code. That seems a rational argument to me and I am not entirely sure if the copy protection in IOTA’s case is deliberate or not but they say it is and his historical work seems to be in line with that

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