[cap-talk] controversial article

[Mark Miller]

On Sat, Jul 4, 2009 at 10:57 AM, Bill Frantz<frantz at pwpconsult.com> wrote:
> erights at gmail.com (Mark Miller) on Saturday, July 4, 2009 wrote:
>
>>I do think that DSR or other such agoric bandwidth allocation systems
>>can provide good defenses against DDOS. In the absence of legacy
>>compatibility constraints, I believe they are straightforwardly
>>technically achievable. But I do not believe they are politically
>>possible anytime in the foreseeable future.
>
> I also question their practical strength against massive distributed denial
> of service attacks from 0wned machines, using the 0wned machine's money.
>
> Of course, the optimist thinks that using the 0wned machine's money changes
> the ecology, and may produce enough incentive to have people protect their
> machines.

There's another incentive issue here as well. If you are a potential
DDOS attacker who has 0wned a bunch of other people's machines whose
DSR usage is funded by these machine's owners, would you rather spend
that stolen money to compensate your DDOS victim (as DSR would do), or
would you rather direct that money-carrying traffic to yourself (or a
laundry) before the funds run out?

Robust incentive arrangements can often be more robust than
correctness, since incentives will often improve the underlying issues
that correctness must merely take as givens.

-- 
Text by me above is hereby placed in the public domain

    Cheers,
    --MarkM