A new DoS protection mechanism for Tor leveraging Proof-of-Work.
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.
Huh, who wouldve thought this is how PoW would actually be used
At least it’s only used when the server is getting stressed.
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.
How would you add it to pfSense, or any other firewall?
Tor can add it to their service, and all clients that wants to use the Tor service needs to implement the same feature. 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.
This isn’t the first proof of work “captcha” system, there’s several already out there.
This one, however, is built right into the protocol.
Sweet! This will help things like dread for sure.
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.
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.
That’s a great idea to kill it once and for all, or maybe to make it really only for pedos, drug dealers and criminals. Good thinking there…
