7 ms·

DDoSCoin: Cryptocurrency with malicious proof of work

153 points by kwantam 10y ago

amingilani 10y ago
I would love to see Anonymous flock to an implementation of this. Hacktivism with a reward.
niftich 10y ago
Intriguing concept, but malicious is orthogonal to illegal, although they are often correlated. Namely, in several jurisdictions, including the one that the paper is presented in, (D)DOS is illegal -- a different point to debate -- making this particular proof-of-work both malicious and illegal. A more intriguing one would be one that's merely (debatably) malicious but not per se illegal, like, say, password hash cracking, which is similar enough to existing PoW schemes to make feasible.
- dnautics 10y ago
  There is something fascinating about making Proudhon's "property is theft!" Real.
- rcthompson 10y ago
  In jurisdictions where it's illegal, would possession of this currency constitute evidence that a person committed a crime?
  - wongarsu 10y ago
    It wouldn't proove that you committed the crime, since you could have gotten the currency through other means. It's also not certain proof that somebody committed a crime, since the currency could have been mined by someone for whoom this was legal. On the other hand, if the DDoS target is located in a country where DDoS is illegal, then in that jurisdiction possession of the currency is certainly evidence that some unknown party participated in the DDoS. That might give police certain priviledges around confiscating any coins, depending on jurisdiction.
- thaumasiotes 10y ago
  > malicious is orthogonal to illegal, although they are often correlated Interesting choice of words. Orthogonal variables are by definition uncorrelated.
  - niftich 10y ago
    My bad about the incorrect usage. Please disregard the original phrasing, as my point is that all four combinations of [malicious, illegal] are possible, with an attempted-but-botched observation that sometimes malicious things are made illegal.
vessenes 10y ago
I haven't done a deep dive, but I think this same proof of work could be instrumented in a smart contract to create a DDOS market, without publishing a new blockchain. Oraclize has already built TLS verification into their solidity contracts for instance. So you could outsource most of the work there, I think. EDIT: Yes, this would definitely work, and be a lot less effort than the paper.
- zmanian 10y ago
  I think you are right. The same techniques could be applied in ethereum to reward ddos attackers. It's beautiful and terrible at the same time. <3 We may have found a deeper horror than assignation markets.
  - wtracy 10y ago
    Did you mean assassination markets, or does "assignation" have another meaning I'm not aware of?
    - zmanian 10y ago
      I meant the former...
      - stcredzero 10y ago
        Assignation markets would probably be an overall societal good, especially if combined with decriminalization.
- dhoe 10y ago
  As the authors write in the paper.
Rauchg 10y ago
Despite this malicious use-case, it's entirely possible that the underlying proof-of-work technique (using the target server's TLS signatures for validation) can inspire some noble applications or smart contracts :) As a somewhat contrived example, instead of blindly trusting that a certain monitoring system like "Uptime Robot" is checking your servers (or going through an expensive access_log based verification), you could verify their proof-of-connection.
- vessenes 10y ago
  That's a nice idea. I think you'd want the opposite though, mostly, proof that the site is down. That's a bit harder. I guess you could ask someone to provide a TLS-notarized response from a TLS-compatible uptime checker.
  - droffel 10y ago
    You could include the hash of the last block in the network as part of your handshake, along with a nonce, and pay out tiny amounts of currency to whoever produces a signed handshake containing that hash (as long as the signed handshake is below a certain number? Not sure if that's useful or not in this situation). But if you want proof of uptime, having a TLS-notarized response with a handshake containing a previous block hash is pretty solid proof.
mmaunder 10y ago
Crawlcoin instead? SE's prove due diligence.
- vessenes 10y ago
  I think the issue there is getting a scheme that has the asymmetric validation. And you want the results of a crawl. You could merkle up the different pages you've crawled, and combine with a part of your public key to get a unique hash. But, the question is why would someone pay for it?
digi_owl 10y ago
Every day we seem to inch our way towads Accelerando...
- adamhepner 10y ago
  Thank you, this seems like an interesting lecture!
runeks 10y ago
I looked through the paper and couldn't find it, so I'll ask here: what is the motivation behind this? I don't understand the purpose of this system. I understand that some people are paid to perform DDoS attacks against specific targets. I don't understand how a special crypto currency changes this. > Miners are incentivized to send and receive > large amounts of network traffic to and from the > target in order to produce a valid proof-of-work. No they are not. Just because you create a "crypto currency", which rewards some activity, does not mean people will start performing this activity. Unless they mistakenly believe the tokens they earn somehow have value. A mined crypto currency needs to have value before miners are incentivized to do what it takes to mine coins. It seems like any paper with the word "Blockchain" in it gets votes to the top regardless of whether or not the system actually provides any additional value. Designing useless systems is not hard. > In order to allow victims to be (temporarily) selected for > DoS, DDoSCoin allows “bounties” for targeting specific servers. To accomplish this, DDoSCoin > introduces a new payment opcode, PAY_TO_DDOS, > that can be used in transactions subject to > certain constraints. So miners perform DDoS attacks to earn coins, and then send these coins in a transaction which incentivizes others to perform DDoS attacks? This makes no sense. A group of supposed DDoS attackers "incentivizing" each other to perform attacks to earn tokens they themselves have created.
- chaosfox 10y ago
  what you are missing is that with this system the miner can prove he performed the attack. The ability to perform DDoS attacks is already valuable in itself, as you said yourself, but you can't prove who performed the attack or that the attack was performed at all, this system allows miners to create the proof by performing the very act of DDoS.
  - stingraycharles 10y ago
    Yes, but that could also be used in just a marketplace, for example, and still does not merit a crypto currency. The neat thing here is that it's programmable and freely accessible to anyone. As others have mentioned, that allows this to be used in smart contracts, etc.
kbody 10y ago
Quite related: https://tlsnotary.org/ https://tlsnotary.org/ https://github.com/tlsnotary/tlsnotary https://github.com/tlsnotary/tlsnotary TLS notarization is a genius idea, but the UX is what is holding it back. However, I'm sure there's room for innovation in this part, just like DDoSCoin shows.
tener 10y ago
Finally we can have a fair market for DDoS! This is what will liberate the system from the evil overlords of DDoS corporations!!!
jerguismi 10y ago
Can't the website owner make quite easily as much TLS proofs as he wants?
- px43 10y ago
  Yes, that's addressed in the paper. If a website owner notices a bounty on their own site, they can very quickly generate the proof needed to collect the bounty without suffering any downtime.
- viraptor 10y ago
  As mentioned it's addressed. But also there's an easy defence of just updating the certificate key if under such attack. With Let's encrypt around, getting a new certificate is not a huge deal anymore. And rekeying is possible with some other services as well.
  - schoen 10y ago
    > With Let's encrypt around, getting a new certificate is not a huge deal anymore. You'd hit the rate limit pretty quickly, though, if you had to keep doing this repeatedly on the same day!
cakoose 10y ago
A primary feature of OTR-style communication protocols is deniable authentication. If Alice and Bob communicate via OTR, Alice can't can prove (cryptographically) to anyone else that the messages she received were actually from Bob. Would an OTR-style protocol be immune any type of DOS proof-of-work? Are there disadvantages to having deniable authentication for the kinds of communication that TLS is used for today? Edit: according to the paper, the attack only works on TLS 1.2+, and only works on the setup phase. Apparently, TLS allows you to forge the contents of the communication. Does OTR allow you to forge the setup phase as well?
qwertyuiop924 10y ago
I had an idea for a cryptocurrency whose PoW would incentivise stealing and erasing files from other computers. I even wrote some code for it, but it seems to have gone missing...
bustajystander 10y ago
I don't see how it is any different than hedging against any real commodity or stock in a traditional banking sense...

153 points by kwantam 10y ago

I would love to see Anonymous flock to an implementation of this. Hacktivism with a reward.

Intriguing concept, but malicious is orthogonal to illegal, although they are often correlated. Namely, in several jurisdictions, including the one that the paper is presented in, (D)DOS is illegal -- a different point to debate -- making this particular proof-of-work both malicious and illegal. A more intriguing one would be one that's merely (debatably) malicious but not per se illegal, like, say, password hash cracking, which is similar enough to existing PoW schemes to make feasible.

dnautics 10y ago
There is something fascinating about making Proudhon's "property is theft!" Real.
rcthompson 10y ago
In jurisdictions where it's illegal, would possession of this currency constitute evidence that a person committed a crime?
- wongarsu 10y ago
  It wouldn't proove that you committed the crime, since you could have gotten the currency through other means. It's also not certain proof that somebody committed a crime, since the currency could have been mined by someone for whoom this was legal. On the other hand, if the DDoS target is located in a country where DDoS is illegal, then in that jurisdiction possession of the currency is certainly evidence that some unknown party participated in the DDoS. That might give police certain priviledges around confiscating any coins, depending on jurisdiction.
thaumasiotes 10y ago
> malicious is orthogonal to illegal, although they are often correlated Interesting choice of words. Orthogonal variables are by definition uncorrelated.
- niftich 10y ago
  My bad about the incorrect usage. Please disregard the original phrasing, as my point is that all four combinations of [malicious, illegal] are possible, with an attempted-but-botched observation that sometimes malicious things are made illegal.

vessenes 10y ago

I haven't done a deep dive, but I think this same proof of work could be instrumented in a smart contract to create a DDOS market, without publishing a new blockchain. Oraclize has already built TLS verification into their solidity contracts for instance. So you could outsource most of the work there, I think. EDIT: Yes, this would definitely work, and be a lot less effort than the paper.

zmanian 10y ago
I think you are right. The same techniques could be applied in ethereum to reward ddos attackers. It's beautiful and terrible at the same time. <3 We may have found a deeper horror than assignation markets.
- wtracy 10y ago
  Did you mean assassination markets, or does "assignation" have another meaning I'm not aware of?
  - zmanian 10y ago
    I meant the former...
    - stcredzero 10y ago
      Assignation markets would probably be an overall societal good, especially if combined with decriminalization.
dhoe 10y ago
As the authors write in the paper.

Rauchg 10y ago

Despite this malicious use-case, it's entirely possible that the underlying proof-of-work technique (using the target server's TLS signatures for validation) can inspire some noble applications or smart contracts :) As a somewhat contrived example, instead of blindly trusting that a certain monitoring system like "Uptime Robot" is checking your servers (or going through an expensive access_log based verification), you could verify their proof-of-connection.

vessenes 10y ago
That's a nice idea. I think you'd want the opposite though, mostly, proof that the site is down. That's a bit harder. I guess you could ask someone to provide a TLS-notarized response from a TLS-compatible uptime checker.
- droffel 10y ago
  You could include the hash of the last block in the network as part of your handshake, along with a nonce, and pay out tiny amounts of currency to whoever produces a signed handshake containing that hash (as long as the signed handshake is below a certain number? Not sure if that's useful or not in this situation). But if you want proof of uptime, having a TLS-notarized response with a handshake containing a previous block hash is pretty solid proof.

mmaunder 10y ago

Crawlcoin instead? SE's prove due diligence.

vessenes 10y ago
I think the issue there is getting a scheme that has the asymmetric validation. And you want the results of a crawl. You could merkle up the different pages you've crawled, and combine with a part of your public key to get a unique hash. But, the question is why would someone pay for it?

digi_owl 10y ago

Every day we seem to inch our way towads Accelerando...

adamhepner 10y ago
Thank you, this seems like an interesting lecture!

runeks 10y ago

I looked through the paper and couldn't find it, so I'll ask here: what is the motivation behind this? I don't understand the purpose of this system. I understand that some people are paid to perform DDoS attacks against specific targets. I don't understand how a special crypto currency changes this. > Miners are incentivized to send and receive > large amounts of network traffic to and from the > target in order to produce a valid proof-of-work. No they are not. Just because you create a "crypto currency", which rewards some activity, does not mean people will start performing this activity. Unless they mistakenly believe the tokens they earn somehow have value. A mined crypto currency needs to have value before miners are incentivized to do what it takes to mine coins. It seems like any paper with the word "Blockchain" in it gets votes to the top regardless of whether or not the system actually provides any additional value. Designing useless systems is not hard. > In order to allow victims to be (temporarily) selected for > DoS, DDoSCoin allows “bounties” for targeting specific servers. To accomplish this, DDoSCoin > introduces a new payment opcode, PAY_TO_DDOS, > that can be used in transactions subject to > certain constraints. So miners perform DDoS attacks to earn coins, and then send these coins in a transaction which incentivizes others to perform DDoS attacks? This makes no sense. A group of supposed DDoS attackers "incentivizing" each other to perform attacks to earn tokens they themselves have created.

chaosfox 10y ago
what you are missing is that with this system the miner can prove he performed the attack. The ability to perform DDoS attacks is already valuable in itself, as you said yourself, but you can't prove who performed the attack or that the attack was performed at all, this system allows miners to create the proof by performing the very act of DDoS.
- stingraycharles 10y ago
  Yes, but that could also be used in just a marketplace, for example, and still does not merit a crypto currency. The neat thing here is that it's programmable and freely accessible to anyone. As others have mentioned, that allows this to be used in smart contracts, etc.

kbody 10y ago

Quite related: https://tlsnotary.org/ https://tlsnotary.org/ https://github.com/tlsnotary/tlsnotary https://github.com/tlsnotary/tlsnotary TLS notarization is a genius idea, but the UX is what is holding it back. However, I'm sure there's room for innovation in this part, just like DDoSCoin shows.

tener 10y ago

Finally we can have a fair market for DDoS! This is what will liberate the system from the evil overlords of DDoS corporations!!!

jerguismi 10y ago

Can't the website owner make quite easily as much TLS proofs as he wants?

px43 10y ago
Yes, that's addressed in the paper. If a website owner notices a bounty on their own site, they can very quickly generate the proof needed to collect the bounty without suffering any downtime.
viraptor 10y ago
As mentioned it's addressed. But also there's an easy defence of just updating the certificate key if under such attack. With Let's encrypt around, getting a new certificate is not a huge deal anymore. And rekeying is possible with some other services as well.
- schoen 10y ago
  > With Let's encrypt around, getting a new certificate is not a huge deal anymore. You'd hit the rate limit pretty quickly, though, if you had to keep doing this repeatedly on the same day!

cakoose 10y ago

A primary feature of OTR-style communication protocols is deniable authentication. If Alice and Bob communicate via OTR, Alice can't can prove (cryptographically) to anyone else that the messages she received were actually from Bob. Would an OTR-style protocol be immune any type of DOS proof-of-work? Are there disadvantages to having deniable authentication for the kinds of communication that TLS is used for today? Edit: according to the paper, the attack only works on TLS 1.2+, and only works on the setup phase. Apparently, TLS allows you to forge the contents of the communication. Does OTR allow you to forge the setup phase as well?

qwertyuiop924 10y ago

I had an idea for a cryptocurrency whose PoW would incentivise stealing and erasing files from other computers. I even wrote some code for it, but it seems to have gone missing...

bustajystander 10y ago

I don't see how it is any different than hedging against any real commodity or stock in a traditional banking sense...