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.

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

  • WhatAmLemmy@lemmy.world
    13·
    1 year ago

    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.

      • newIdentity@sh.itjust.works
        3·
        1 year ago

        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.

  • Treczoks@lemm.ee
    22·
    1 year ago

    The article is quite vague on how this is implemented. Does it require JS to be activated to work? That would be a big NO for anyone really looking into privacy, but could work for those who use TOR basically as a free VPN to escape stupid geoblocking rules.

    And what will prevent DDOSers from just creating dummy requests without the intention to ever wanting to solve any PoWs? It will still allocate resources on the other side.

  • makeasnek@lemmy.ml
    311·
    1 year ago

    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.