Author Topic: The potential for DDoS in DPOS  (Read 4891 times)

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Offline monsterer

Svk pretty much said it. Since delegates are just block signers and not miners it's easy to abandon a host under attack and switch to the failover. For a ddos attack to be effective they'd need to hit literally dozens of delegates at the same time. The network would then slow down for a few minutes while the delegates brought up new hosts.

It might be worse than you think. Typically hosting companies will actually remove the server under attack from their network in order to preserve their other customer's service. Then the control is out of the hands of the delegate under attack.
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Offline Riverhead

Svk pretty much said it. Since delegates are just block signers and not miners it's easy to abandon a host under attack and switch to the failover. For a ddos attack to be effective they'd need to hit literally dozens of delegates at the same time. The network would then slow down for a few minutes while the delegates brought up new hosts.

Offline svk

I'm no expert on this but I suppose a real hacker could analyse the IP addresses of the peers in the client to somehow determine the IPs of delegates. If they then proceed to DDOS those delegates, those delegates would start missing blocks. This would slow down the network but that's all, there's no automatic replacement of inactive delegates or delegates missing blocks as we've seen very clearly with the recent case of delegate.adam.

The delegate who is being DDOS'ed would be notified, either by an automatic service or through other means. He could then shut down that VPS if possible, and could easily spin up a standby VPS or even use his own computer in order to set up a new instance of the delegate and start signing blocks again. The attacker would then need to reidentify the delegate's IP in order to continue the attack.

One could also shield one's delegate behind a web of seed nodes by connecting to them directly and not advertising one's IP I think, and also refuse incoming connections.
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Offline JA

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from the succescouncil post:
Quote
With regard to DPOS while delegates are known their IP addresses are not known publically
edit: nevermind it's actually pretty easy to find the IP adresses
« Last Edit: December 10, 2014, 10:20:01 am by jabbajabba »

Offline VoR0220

side tangent before I start: Not going to lie, rereading that title made me smile a bit.

Moving on: So I was poking my nose around the interwebz for reviews of the DPOS mechanism, specifically in regards to security. I managed to find this article:
http://tpbit.blogspot.ca/2014/08/thoughts-on-delegated-proof-of-stake.html

while I'm aware there's a response here: http://successcouncil.com/post.php?info=Max-Wrights-thoughts-on-the-Security-threats-of-Delegated-Proof-of-Stake-and-Bitshares I would like to know what the community makes of these accusations regarding the potential for Delegates to be attacked via a DDoS attack and generally mess up everything for everyone?

Are the delegates secure from these attacks with recent updates? Are the accusations unfounded?
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