Today, we are officially introducing a proof-of-work (PoW) defense for onion services designed to prioritize verified network traffic as a deterrent against denial of service (DoS) attacks with the release of Tor 0.4.8.
Either that or charging a micro transaction for loading the page. But yeah the goal is to make it cost a small amount that is insignificant to a regular user but adds up to a huge amount at the scale of a spam farm. And it’s also the same rationale behind hashing passwords with multiple rounds. It adds a tiny lag when you log in correctly but adds an insane amount of work if you’re checking every phrase in a password cracking dictionary using an offline attack because it adds up.(In the online scenario you just block them after a few attempts)
I bet that commenter got triggered because cyrpto bad!!! There
Anyway, ain’t pow like the only practical solution to fight bots?
Share Some conputer to enter… Seems fair if you are good faith single actor but very expensive if you are running a botnet campaign
Either that or charging a micro transaction for loading the page. But yeah the goal is to make it cost a small amount that is insignificant to a regular user but adds up to a huge amount at the scale of a spam farm. And it’s also the same rationale behind hashing passwords with multiple rounds. It adds a tiny lag when you log in correctly but adds an insane amount of work if you’re checking every phrase in a password cracking dictionary using an offline attack because it adds up. (In the online scenario you just block them after a few attempts)
No, in my eyes PoW is just a waste of resources. At least let them do some useful computation for the node.