- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
A new DoS protection mechanism for Tor leveraging Proof-of-Work.
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Huh, who wouldve thought this is how PoW would actually be used
The creators, actually.
The concept was invented by Moni Naor and Cynthia Dwork in 1993 as a way to deter denial-of-service attacks and other service abuses such as spam on a network by requiring some work from a service requester.
Man the comments section on the tor project blog are just as smooth brained as YouTube comments sections.
I kinda expected better of the average reader than commenting “hmm another captcha” 6 hours after they explicitly clarified this isn’t visible to the user (which was also implicit in the whole 30ms time specified).
Like 10 points for reading the article but -30 for reading comprehension.
Definitely a step in the right direction for the Tor network. If they wanted to take it to the next level, they could use blockchain to enable people to buy “priority” access in some way (Monero, lightning, their own token, whatever). This could subsidize people who host Tor routers, while making sure a free tier was enabled for all users who need it. This could massively increase the size of the Tor network as right now Tor server hosting is just done out of expensive altruism. Bigger network = bigger free tier = faster Tor for everybody.
This is a pretty excellent use case for PoW. I could see this being adopted by other DDoS services, server stacks, and eventually make its way into openwrt, pfsense etc.
This isn’t the first proof of work “captcha” system, there’s several already out there.
