A couple of university professors in the United States published a document presented a cryptocurrency that could be used to pay participants in denial of service attacks on online servers, better known as DDoS attacks. Although it is only a draft and has not been executed, the information presented is enough to run a cryptocurrency for these particular uses.
The cryptocurrency has been named DDoSCoin and was proposed jointly by Professors Eric Wustrow University of Colorado Boulder and Benjamin VanderSloot the University of Michigan, who emphasize that the document laying claim to know that the idea is possible, but not drive to reality project implementation.
The document itself, is titled DDoSCoin: Malicious cryptocurrency with a Proof-of-Work, which translates as DDoSCoin: Maliciosa cryptocurrency with a proof-of-work. This is because the algorithm used for generating the coins is based on verifying that a user actually has participated in a denial service to a particular server.
The denial of service (DDoS) are those made against Internet servers through a large number of incoming requests in a short time. This achieves overwhelm servers unable to handle the high traffic and therefore required force to stop its services temporarily. One of the most famous DDoS attacks recently starred as the hacktivist group Anonymous to the website of PayPal in 2010, after the company shut its financing channel web portal Wikileaks.
According to the design proposed in the paper, attackers (miners) can create new valid block transactions when a response TLS connections to the server that satisfies a target of difficulty proposed by the network and may create new coins is confirmed. Subsequently, the DDoSCoins could be negotiated by other criptomonedas as Bitcoin and ethereum.
DDoSCoin allows miners demonstrate that they have contributed to a denial-of-service attack against specific target servers. This test involves making a large number of TLS connections to a target server and responses using encryption to prove that there has been a large number of connections. Proof-of-DDoS can be used to replace the test-of-work in an environment criptomonedas, provided there is consensus on what the victims are valid targets.
Document DDoSCoin
TLS connections (Transport Layer Security) are those that are made through this security protocol, which according to Alexa statistics website, and is accepted by more than 56% of Internet portals. The TLS protocol is the evolution of SSL (Secure Sockets Layer), both cryptographic security protocols designed to provide communications between computers on a network.
According to the study authors suggest, implementation of DDoSCoin could encourage activists computer to perform this type of denial of service attacks, thus encouraging greater efforts to add thanks to gains received in criptomonedas. It should be noted that the concept of consensus is also present in this proposal, so that participating users to vote and choose which servers will be considered valid targets for an attack bonus.
DDoSCoin is clearly a double-edged weapon that has been exposed, though not materialized, which can draw the attention of legal authorities in this respect. However, hackers would be the first who come to consider such a proposal before deciding to implement it. In any case, there is no doubt that it is one of the most original ideas and controversies that have emerged so far in the world of cryptocurrency.