DDoSCoin: New Crypto-Currency Rewards Users For Participating In DDoS Attacks (softpedia.com)

An anonymous reader writes from a report via Softpedia: "In the most innovative, weirdest, and stupidest idea of the month, two researchers from the University of Colorado Boulder and the University of Michigan have created a crypto-currency that rewards people for participating in DDoS attacks," reports Softpedia. "Called DDoSCoin, this digital currency rewards a person (the miner) for using their computer as part of a DDoS attack. Just like Bitcoin, DDoSCoin uses cryptographic data to provide a proof-of-work. In DDoSCoin's case, this proof-of-work is extracted from the TLS connection a miner establishes with the website they're supposed to attack." This means that DDoSCoin can be used only with DDoS attacks on TLS-enabled websites. Participating in DDoS attacks gives miners DDoSCoin, which can then be converted in Bitcoin or fiat currency. Furthermore, anyone can request a DDoS attack via the PAY_TO_DDOS transaction. The research paper that proposes DDoSCoin is only a theoretical exercise, and a DDoSCoin crypto-currency does not currently exist in the real world. For now.

Comments

A Better Name?

[IonOtter]

How about DarwinCoin: stupidity-based currency that eliminates the wielder from the gene pool.

I can't even

[softnewsit]

I can't even wrap my head around the idea of this currency... WHY DOES THIS EXIST? EVEN IN THEORY!

Re:I can't even

[flopsquad]

I can't even wrap my head around the idea of this currency... WHY DOES THIS EXIST? EVEN IN THEORY!

There can be no light without the dark. Asshattery like this is more than proof of (its own) concept. It shows us that there can be noble and benevolent cryptocurrencies that reward doing good stuff!

Imaging a CC that rewarded participating in SETI or protein folding or whatever.

Or take saving for retirement. There could be a CC that rewarded you for doing that. And it would end up giving you like $0.000003 in value for performing an action that will ultimately end up being more valuable (with compound interest) by a factor of 10^10. But what's important is that you got your FogeyCoin for making that deposit, ya know?

Is it Spoofable

[vux984]

Is it spoofable?

Can I simply drop the ddos packets at my outgoing firewall, but still show as having contributed, and having 'done the work' ?

Or setup a target virtual machine on the IP address, configure my router to point at that, and then ddos the shite out of it ?

Re: Is it Spoofable

[Ash-Fox]

I did. and so, yes, i guess outright dropping the packets isn't going to fly, but i still wonder if there is room to proxy it in some way, and make a single connection to the target count as multiple attempts...

From the paper:

Miners in DDoSCoin repeatedly create connections to a TLS victim server, and check for a response that satisfies a target difficulty decided by the network. If the response satisfies this condition, then parameters of the TLS hand-shake can be published by the miner to create a new valid block.

You have to somehow generate valid responses to create blocks in a short time span, which is currently not very feasable with current technology if you're bruteforcing it.

Re:What happened to USENIX?

[pedantic bore]

Oh, never mind. I saw the USENIX in the URL and jumped to a conclusion. It's just the Workshop on Offensive Technologies. Perfectly appropriate for that.