DDoS Mitigation with Proof of Work - Creating the first seethe-based shitcoin

[your stupid]

Since now's as good of a time as any to sperg about potential networking solutions, here's something I've been looking into lately: Proof of Work as a DDoS mitigation.

There's been a number of whitepapers to come out in the last few years describing the concept: Before clients are allowed to access content, they have to expend CPU power solving a puzzle with a complexity level that's proportional to the amount of requests being made. So far the one implementation I've seen is PoW-Shield, a modestly supported github project that uses client-side javascript to protect against application-layer attacks. I can't speak to its robustness given the size and age of the project, but it might be worth a test run at some point in time. If it ends up working as intended, that would put Cloudflare firmly in the cuckshed.

As far as a transport-layer implementations go, I've only come across a whitepaper that describes the use of PoW via a UDP service. While this would be quite a bit trickier to work into existing server stacks, the conclusions are heartening at least.

 

[Toolbox]

While it's good to be looking into alternatives that can't just be taken right from under the site, proof of work would be another layer of slowness added to the experience no?

 

[your stupid]

I would imagine so, though it probably depends on how it's implemented. According to that whitepaper it was definitely the case at the transport-layer, but they concede that the loss in speed might have had more to do with their code quality. I'm currently watching through this video to see if the PoW Shield devs touch on the loss in speed. So far it seems like it would actually take up less time than Cloudflare repeatedly making you fill out CAPTCHAs.