It needs to be verifiable to be protected from spoofing, and encrypted to be protected from listening. You can't verify arbitrary network traffic because servers aren't stateless, but you can encrypt some traffic (https). Sadly, the encrypted traffic still has some metadata, such as server ip, sometimes hostname, request size.

Either way, it can't be protected in the way filecoin/gridcoin are protected.

I think the idea was to reward all exit nodes, to provide an incentive for doing so that doesn't involve malicious behavior. Hopefully that would drown the malicious nodes in a sea of non-malicious operators who are here for the cryptocurrency rewards.

Of course a way to prove you are not malicious would be great but I don't see how you can prove that using technology.