From r.pickhardt at gmail.com  Sun Aug 27 07:24:23 2023
From: r.pickhardt at gmail.com (=?UTF-8?Q?Ren=C3=A9_Pickhardt?=)
Date: Sun, 27 Aug 2023 09:24:23 +0200
Subject: [Lightning-dev] TOR enabled dynamic Proof of Work defense for onion
	services
Message-ID: <CAJ5H3Z7NGJtGkURzcjkey2ynOm2kTzXAF1AW3eY-cBzrG1FRrA@mail.gmail.com>

Dear fellow Lightning Network developers,

given the congestion problems with channels (aka jamming) that we are
facing and the various proposals and ideas that are floating around I
thought I quickly notify you that the TOR project has introduced a dynamic
proof of work system together with a market based auction system for
bandwidth via a priority queue to fight DoS attacks [0]. While our problems
differ I think there are still enough similarities to justify the relevance
of this mail.

In their technical document [1] they mention that their new patch cannot
defend against a large botnet and suggest that anonymous credentials [2]
among other techniques should be investigated.

Personal comment: I am a bit surprised that while they obviously looked at
Bitcoin they seemed to not have seriously considered to just use Bitcoin
(for example via Lightning Network paywalls) or a mining protocol directly.
Instead they argue that the auction based bids are more suitable than a
static difficulty target as used in bitcoin. However IMHO the dynamic
properties of their auction mechanism could easily have been achieve by the
amount of sats being offered instead of a dynamic proof of work solution.

With kind regards Rene Pickhardt


[0]
https://blog.torproject.org/introducing-proof-of-work-defense-for-onion-services/

[1]
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/core/torspec/-/blob/main/proposals/327-pow-over-intro.txt

[2] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2020-March/014198.html
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