Question about DDoS and Peershares

[JordanLee]

Someone sent me a PM expressing concern about DDoS attacks against tiny Peershare networks. First, he quoted me:

“The only IT infrastructure they need to support this consists of simply running the LocalFood Peershares client at all times from a single ordinary server.”

Then he expressed these concerns:

"If some black hat person wanted to discover where their server is, and DDoS it, is it possible with the Peershares protocol?

I’m always worried about security, and exchanges continually get DDoS’d to manipulate trading.

If people use Peershare, from mom and pop startups to seek funding, and it is easy for blackhats to realize who is running “a single ordinary server”, then that is worrisome."

Bitcoin has experienced some recent troubles with DDoS because fees are not required as part of the protocol. Peercoin is not vulnerable to this because of the transaction fees which are absolutely required. Peershares would perform similarly so long as the fee is high enough.

In any case, decentralization of the network is optimal and encouraged by offering shareholder PoS block rewards. But if you are trying to raise $10,000 and just setting up your network, its a great feature that decentralization is not required.

[Ben]

Edit: I split out the checkpoint question into it’s own topic to keep this one focused on the original question. Here’s the link: http://www.peercointalk.org/index.php?topic=2343

[ppcman]

@Jordan Lee

Bitcoin has experienced some recent troubles with DDoS because fees are not required as part of the protocol. Peercoin is not vulnerable to this because of the transaction fees which are absolutely required. Peershares would perform similarly so long as the fee is high enough.

Yes the fee must be high enough. Of course black hat hackers have access to coins and will happily spend transaction fees during an attack, if the manipulation or DDoS will work out in their favor when the attack is over.

I hope a test network appears with Peershares on Peercoin test net, so people can brute force and attempt some small DDoS to see how things behave before going live.

[Fuzzybear]

@ppcman

[quote=“Jordan Lee, post:1, topic:2031”]Bitcoin has experienced some recent troubles with DDoS because fees are not required as part of the protocol. Peercoin is not vulnerable to this because of the transaction fees which are absolutely required. Peershares would perform similarly so long as the fee is high enough.

Yes the fee must be high enough. Of course black hat hackers have access to coins and will happily spend transaction fees during an attack, if the manipulation or DDoS will work out in their favor when the attack is over.

I hope a test network appears with Peershares on Peercoin test net, so people can brute force and attempt some small DDoS to see how things behave before going live.[/quote]
sounds like a sensible suggestion and would not take too much to actually set up and try so I think we should.

Fuzzybear

[JordanLee]

@FuzzyBear

[quote=“ppcman, post:3, topic:2031”][quote=“Jordan Lee, post:1, topic:2031”]Bitcoin has experienced some recent troubles with DDoS because fees are not required as part of the protocol. Peercoin is not vulnerable to this because of the transaction fees which are absolutely required. Peershares would perform similarly so long as the fee is high enough.

Yes the fee must be high enough. Of course black hat hackers have access to coins and will happily spend transaction fees during an attack, if the manipulation or DDoS will work out in their favor when the attack is over.

I hope a test network appears with Peershares on Peercoin test net, so people can brute force and attempt some small DDoS to see how things behave before going live.[/quote]
sounds like a sensible suggestion and would not take too much to actually set up and try so I think we should.

Fuzzybear[/quote]

Yes this suggestion is very sensible but it is not anywhere near the top of our prioritized list right now.