Proof-of-Work Defense for Onion Services

Re:Proof-of-Work Defense for Onion Services by extraduder_ire on Thursday August 24, 2023 @06:34PM (#37255434)

I'm surprised something like this wasn't done sooner, and also haven't read the proposal [0] in enough detail to tell if this will lead to more data affecting the anonymity of users. Should be fine though, since it's tied user-to-service and not stored anywhere.

I'm wondering how much this will decrease load on the service being proxied vs the nodes themselves though, I assume it'll have more benefit to services since access is spread out between multiple nodes.

[0]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/core/torspec/-/blob/main/p...

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Re:Proof-of-Work Defense for Onion Services by KirillPanov on Friday August 25, 2023 @03:30AM (#37259080)

> I'm surprised something like this wasn't done sooner,

It should have been, but was delayed by people shrieking about oceans boiling.

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Re:Proof-of-Work Defense for Onion Services by evgen on Friday August 25, 2023 @03:56AM (#37259233)

FWIW, we talked about using things like hashcash to prevent abuse and similar attacks for anonymous remailers back in the early 90s. Talking about it is one thing, actually making the commitment to do it is something else entirely. Given interest in cryptocurrencies there has also been a lot more effort devoted to considering the cost/feature tradeoffs of various PoW mechanisms (and a broader familiarity with the general concept among the target population), so it is possible that we are seeing a happy side-effect of years of cryptocurrency hype.

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Re:Proof-of-Work Defense for Onion Services by flangola7 on Friday August 25, 2023 @09:14AM (#37261333)

>shrieking

No one is doing any such thing.

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Re:Proof-of-Work Defense for Onion Services by alphaddx on Friday August 25, 2023 @04:11PM (#37266453)

Someone is shrieking about it in the thread above.

>salawat

>PoW is nothing but wasted, needless computation. Computing is not free. Every watt spent doing anything PoW is just that much more intensification of our current climate crisis.

>As someone with temps of 109 with heat index of 120 coming in the next few days, with all due respect, fuck anyone who proposes PoW is a good idea for anything.

>It isn't interesting. It's the most egregious example of conspicuous consumption on the planet.

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Re:Proof-of-Work Defense for Onion Services by AlexeyBelov on Sunday August 27, 2023 @02:34AM (#37279991)

I don't see any shrieking. Are you shrieking as well?

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Re:Proof-of-Work Defense for Onion Services by flangola7 on Wednesday August 30, 2023 @10:09PM (#37331659)

Where is the shrieking? Nothing in the text you quoted shows this. Are you a bot?

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