A new DoS protection mechanism for Tor leveraging Proof-of-Work.

44 points

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.

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24 points

Huh, who wouldve thought this is how PoW would actually be used

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14 points
*

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.

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14 points

At least it’s only used when the server is getting stressed.

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22 points

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.

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7 points
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2 points

If Netgate added this to the internet protocols, no other device would be able to communicate with pfSense, unless they also used this special network stack.

I mean technically that’s also the case with the Tor protocol.

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10 points
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This isn’t the first proof of work “captcha” system, there’s several already out there.

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15 points

This one, however, is built right into the protocol.

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3 points
6 points

Sweet! This will help things like dread for sure.

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