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.
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The article is quite vague on how this is implemented. Does it require JS to be activated to work? That would be a big NO for anyone really looking into privacy, but could work for those who use TOR basically as a free VPN to escape stupid geoblocking rules.
And what will prevent DDOSers from just creating dummy requests without the intention to ever wanting to solve any PoWs? It will still allocate resources on the other side.
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.