POW on Tor. Tor is a decentralized network for anonymous surfing on the Internet. To do this, user traffic passes through a multitude of servers. As a result, it is virtually impossible to trace traffic back to its origin. From now on, Tor adopts Proof of Work to make its network more secure and robust. No cryptocurrency on the horizon.
Tor integrates Proof of Work
Torshort for The Onion Router, is one of the oldest anonymizing networks on the Internet.
On August 23, the Tor Project teams announced a major evolution. With the arrival of Tor 0.4.8, the network introduces a defense service based on Proof of Work. Please note that there is no cryptocurrency behind it. However, the PoW system is used to secure the network, in a way similar to the PoW more widely known in cryptos.
The aim of this new functionality is to deter DDoS attacks. As a reminder, a DDoS attack aims to flood a server with requests in order to saturate it and render it inoperative.
« Tor’s PoW defense is a dynamic, reactive mechanism that remains inactive under normal usage conditions to ensure a seamless user experience, but when an onion service is under pressure, the mechanism will ask incoming client connections to perform a number of increasingly complex operations. »
In practice, when a Tor network service comes under pressure, the PoW mechanism takes over. This prompts incoming connections to perform a number of increasingly complex operations.
This allows the service to sort connections according to work performedjustifying their legitimacy.
As a result, attacks on a Tor server or service will be much more costly than before.
For the record, a » onion service « is a website accessible only via the Tor network. Unlike traditional sites, these have addresses ending with the » .onion « .
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A much-needed update
As the Tor teams explain, this update was more than necessary. Indeed, onion services, designed for protect users’ anonymity by hiding IP addresses, are naturally vulnerable to denial-of-service attacks.
Although there are traditional protections based on IP rate limiting, these are not sufficiently effective.
Consequently, the introduction of a proof of work makes it possible to overcome this vulnerability, without compromising confidentiality.
This update is excellent news for user confidentiality. Especially as privacy in general is increasingly being called into question. For example, the founders of Tornado Cash were recently arrested in the United States. Their crime? Creating an open source transaction anonymization software.
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