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.
No, it’s built into the protocol: think of it like as if every http request forces you to attach some tiny additional box containing the solution to a math puzzle.
The twist is that you want the math puzzle to be easy to create and verify, but hard to compute. The harder the puzzle you solve, the more you get prioritized by the service that sent you the puzzle.
If your puzzle is cheaper to create than hosting your service is, then it’s much harder to ddos you since attackers get stuck at the puzzle, rather than getting to your expensive service
No, it’s built into the protocol: think of it like as if every http request forces you to attach some tiny additional box containing the solution to a math puzzle.
The twist is that you want the math puzzle to be easy to create and verify, but hard to compute. The harder the puzzle you solve, the more you get prioritized by the service that sent you the puzzle.
If your puzzle is cheaper to create than hosting your service is, then it’s much harder to ddos you since attackers get stuck at the puzzle, rather than getting to your expensive service
Ah, ok. that clarifies it.