On Oct 10, 2014, at 9:25 PM, Michael Richardson <[email protected]> wrote:

> 
> Graham Bartlett (grbartle) <[email protected]> wrote:
>> Now the only issue I can see is alluded to in the draft, where a VPN
>> headend is serving clients with varying resource. So say a botnet
>> attacks this headend and the puzzle is enabled, you have some clients
>> with a lot of resource (that require a hard puzzle) and some mobile
>> devices with minimal (that require an easier puzzle). How do you
>> identify each? The only way I can think is you must do this once the
>> device has authenticated itself - else how do you know who they are?
> 
> I have two observations here.
> 
> The first is that while the botnet can pull in potentially hundreds of
> teraflops of computation in order to solve a harder puzzle, it has
> communication overhead in order to do that;
> 
> The second observation is that the puzzle has to be trivially parallelizable
> in order for the botnet (or even the multi-core mobile phone!) to do better
> than a single CPU.

I don’t think this is the best strategy for the botnet. Rather than pool all 
their resources to solve a single puzzle (bitcoin-style), wouldn’t it be better 
for each node to act like a legitimate client and solve its own puzzle in 
however long it takes?

Yoav

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