How could we protect the SAFE Network, publicID's and farming?

Cybersecurity
1

Although I don’t mind people using botnets to let the SAFE Network grow, there is a problem. What if later we have 100K normal users and a 100M botnet providing resources? Even worse if this botnet gets taken offline. SAFEcoin will be free money for all the people who can farm (even more so, if it’s not your computer/resources). We all want to see the SAFE Network grow, but a human powered natural growth seems more beneficial to us all.

Should the SAFE Network charge 1 SAFEcoin/100Gb before people can start farming? It would prevent farmer whales from giving resources that don’t give any guarantee to the SAFE Network. Resources will be offline sometimes, but if your farming is linked to your publicID all should be good. On small devices farming could be free of charge, because generally they won’t carry the weight of the network, I think.

We’ve talked about this in the past, captcha on the Demo app could also help with an automated script publicID squatting. This will maybe also create a even playground for all, who want to turn this into a job. :stuck_out_tongue:

Nothing is guaranteed, but if we can secure the SAFE Network through real people who knows.

2

I think the opportunity to make money by just running a program on your computer will attract a big number of people to SAFE. There might be botnets but all is limited to the amount of bandwidth available over a connection. So one could run 50 vault, but if their bandwidth doesn’t support that it makes no sense to do so.

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I think the thing with botnets is that they might run 10 million computers, but they are just tapping into other people their resources. We don’t want to get a false impression that the SAFE Network got enough resources. 10Tb community driving resources, doesn’t weight up to 1000Tb botnet provided resources.

Bitcoin mining was done for a while with botnets and SAFEcoin farming seems to be the next logic step. I don’t mind all the resources we’ll get, but if we can loose it all in just one blow, it might hurt us. Our current tests are based on the idea that normal people will run the SAFE Network but where there is money to be made for free greedy people will come.

Botnets got no resources/bandwidth problems, what could limit their farming is if they have to pay a 1 time fee, to start farming on the SAFE Network.

[quote=“polpolrene, post:2, topic:10137”]
I think the opportunity to make money by just running a program on your computer will attract a big number of people to SAFE.
[/quote] I know we need these big numbers, but 1 SAFE Networker wouldn’t mind to pay just 1 SAFEcoin to the SAFE Network to start farming. It will also give SAFEcoin’s more value, because you need it first, before you can make more of it. A 10M botnet, would need 10M SAFEcoins to start farming and in the current state it needs zilch.

IMHO farming for free is an attack vector. Governments that hate the SAFE Network, could make money with it and then abruptly just turn off their resources. After they converted their SAFEcoin to Dogecoin, it’s a :dog: eat :dog2: world. Just because the SAFE Network is cutting edge, doesn’t mean that it can’t be attacked, by simply providing resources to it (you want to fight them? join them). Egypt is a perfect example that governments can just turns things off. Let’s make it costly for big spenders to do stuff like this… :stuck_out_tongue:

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4

Reserving existing URLs from the top 1 million websites would be trivial and could allow those owners to evidence their ownership by posting a unique file to the top of their domain. They could claim their reserved name for a fee from Maidsafe.

I wouldn’t mind seeing a fee for publicIDs less than 6 characters and letting the remainder fly. There’s some balance then where it’s just not worth the time for squatters. Captcha perhaps not needed if the registration is already required through the Demo App or equivalent.

As for farming, it’s in the interests of those running vaults in whatever manner, to ensure they are useful to the network. The network needs to be clever with what nodes it uses and perhaps a persistent kudos being signed and rewarded will allow nodes to return quickly where they go offline. Some logarithmic limiting ability on the acquisition of kudos will perhaps help resolve what nodes are the backbone of the network - and that can be established in the beginning days and weeks and months.

5

A couple of considerations

  • This should only be an issue when the network is small. Your figure of 100K authentic nodes would represent a turning point in this sort of scenario.
  • Botnets have the problem that they will not be able to be anywhere near 100M nodes of high enough resourced PC’s/connections. While you might get a huge botnet upto 100 M nodes, it is not going to have 100M successful PCs
  • People will notice their internet speed slowing down for the most part.
  • There are very significant differences between the botnets used for bitcoin mining (when miners were just Graphic cards) and for farming.
    • Income comparison
      • BTC mining medium to good (when it was being done
      • Farming Very small and gets even smaller to none as more vaults come on line
      • Analysis BTC mining Botnet very profitable and more profitable as botnet grows. But farming returns are small and much less profitable as the botnet grows.
    • virus/malware detectors have become more “aware” of botnets and respond quickly to identifying them and ridding the affected computers. A botnet for farming would be found quickly because of the relatively large internet traffic caused for the affected PCs
      • bitcoin botnet used spare CPU/GPU capacity and easy to hide by setting the mining activities to very low priority
      • farming cannot reduce the internet traffic too much otherwise the botnet node is rejected.
      • Analysis - BTC mining can effectively hide CPU/GPU used but required internet traffic is quickly noticed when botnet nodes on a slow link cannot stream netflix adequately because of the (minimium) increased traffic caused by a couple of PCs in the home being part of the botnet. Only need one such case reported to a virus detection company for a detection system to be incorporated in all virus/malware detectors.

Just a couple of thoughts.

My opinion is that while farming botnets are possible the indiscriminate nature of recruiting PCs to be a part of the botnet will result in its early detection and result in too many botnet nodes being added and thus the farming rewards will tend towards zero very (extremely) quickly

Using your 100K legit nodes and 100M (even 1M) botnet nodes will see the Farming rewards be at 2^63 GETs per coin. The spare capacity will be SO LARGE that farming will result in no coins for everyone while the botnet runs.

tl;dr no profit for a very large botnet. Actually zero returns

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6

How does a user get the 1 safecoin if they can’t farm? I don’t think it should be required for people to pay money to use the network. The whole point of the network is that it’s reliant on the circulation of computer resources.

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The attack on the DAO is a good example, that there are people who simply don’t care about anything except profit. What if it’s in the interests of those running vaults that the SAFE Network doesn’t exist at all or if they can just damage it?

[quote=“neo, post:5, topic:10137”]
tl;dr no profit for a very large botnet. Actually zero returns
[/quote]What if you have exabytes and the taxpayers foot the bill? Whoever got more resources will always store more data. Even if the goal is not profit, just the mere fact of storing more data and just suddenly turning if off, could do damage to the SAFE Network. A pay to farm setup, is almost like a POS, the more you want to farm, the more SAFEcoins you need to do that. If publicID’s, storage costs SAFEcoin why shoulden’t farming?

People often forget that Tor gets hacked constantly by governments, not that it’s comparable, but whoever got more resources can always do more.

[quote=“Blindsite2k, post:6, topic:10137”]
How does a user get the 1 safecoin if they can’t farm? I don’t think it should be required for people to pay money to use the network.
[/quote]People with small devices can just farm for free (this was David’s idea), but if you want to provide resources above a threshold you should pay a SAFEcoin, because the SAFE Network will depend more on you.

[quote=“Blindsite2k, post:6, topic:10137”]
The whole point of the network is that it’s reliant on the circulation of computer resources.
[/quote]How can you rely on a botnet’s resources? They get taken out regularly by governments. How can you even rely on resources provided by a government that hates the SAFE Network, they can easily take that resource away. The SAFE Network can’t know what is really useful resource. It’s a mistake to think that everything is with good intentions. BTW when people pay to farm, SAFEcoin is circulating through the SAFE Network again.

This is almost comparable to our false sense of security, just because you can antivirus doesn’t mean that there is no virus. It can get even so sick that your antivirus program is the virus and you don’t even know it. PublicID, storage and computing will cost SAFEcoin, just so that we put a limit on things, if we don’t limit the possibility to farm we might be surprised someday.

8

You’re still not answering the question. Not everyone uses small mobile devices. Some people just use a desktop or a laptop. Are you saying those people shouldn’t be able to use the SAFE network? And again you’ve got it backwards. If you can’t farm how do you pay the 1 safecoin? You aquire safecoin through farming. Are you saying new users should enter the network with a default debt for the sake of botnetters?

Irrelevant. SAFE is designed to withstand such things. Look sure a gov’t may set up a botnet and sure it may take it down (and forfeit it’s profits) but not every government and user around the planet will do so at the same time! SAFE distributes data around the entire globe.

When people pay to farm it’s like trying to get water to flow uphill. People farm in order to GET safecoin. The supposition is that the DON’T HAVE safecoin. You can’t pay what you don’t have. Use some basic math skills man. 0 - 1 = 0. No farming = no safecoin payments. And people would be less inclined to farm if they needed to dish out money in order to buy safecoin from an exchange in order to join the network.

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9

But the point was that if there is plenty of spare space (eg as much spare as is used) then the farming rewards are VERY small. Depending on the algorithm which may change due to TP, TB, TS system changing depends on what ratio of spare to used space will cause the farming rate to drop to 1 coin per 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 GETs.

The larger the Botnet the less coins the botnet earns. So if the bot net is 1000 times the size of normal nodes then the amount of free space will be many times what will cause the Farming rate to be effectively zero.

A pay to farm system creates the chicken-n-egg problem where people need safecoin to start farming but they don’t have any and need farming to get a coin to open their account. Remember that the plan is to make people spend one coin for storage to make their account permanent.

So in fact Botnets work against the botnet owner. The bigger their botnet the less they make from it.[quote=“19eddyjohn75, post:7, topic:10137”]
How can you rely on a botnet’s resources? They get taken out regularly by governments. How can you even rely on resources provided by a government that hates the SAFE Network,
[/quote]

Because once the network has grown to a certain size (say 100+K nodes) any one entity cannot create enough resources to bring it down completely. Now if a government wishes to throw all their resources to bring a 1+M legit node safe network then there are better ways to do it.

I have yet to see any one entity throw as much resource as what a large botnet can at any problem. In other words if safenet can survive a large botnet then history shows the governments are unlikely to do any more than that anyhow.

No system cannot resist a a force that is going to beat it. You seems to keep redefining your “attack” to be one that has so much more resource than what can be reasonably included in a SAFE network. So yes if the NSA added 100 billion nodes of 1 peta bytes each then removed all at once then currently no large safe network could resist that.

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If the NSA threw 1 billion nodes with 1 peta bytes each I doubt they’d have any space left over to spy on anyone. And even if they brought the network down we could just start it up again. Remember a lot of people will be keeping their data locally as well.

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The other point is “when” this “large” attack happens. Many nodes will basically be on 24/7 and it seems that archive nodes will be sooner than later. So in effect while the 100 times bigger (than safe) botnet starts up the existing data will likely be safe and the new data maybe at risk.

But if we come back to reality then a large safe network (100K - 1M) node network will be sufficiently secure against any organised botnet that we have experienced. But also in reality any entity wishing to throw that sort of resource around cannot do it for free, it costs someone somewhere something. A cracker, its time, effort and loss of actual income from their botnet. For a government its keeping it secret, allocating all the resources to do it. And with all the expenditure committees etc, it will be both a difficult operation and prone to blow up in their face. Not to mention what you said and that applying all that resource to attack a global SAFE is nigh on impossible because they are always short on resources to do their spying etc

Also in reality a botnet will only slowly fill up (weeks to months) return no income and 1000% likely to be detected before its vaults are filled up enough to cause a problem.

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Blessed are pessimists for they keep backups.

Also, it’s not unreasonable… despite the thought that SAFE is robust to all attacks, even on the clearnet, you wouldn’t expect to not keep a backup of a website. User/business data equally perhaps should not expect to use any solution without a backup. The worst might be applications being disrupted but if the network is distributed, then it works - if it’s not distributed, it’s liable to centralised actions.

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Exactly. TheDAo doesn´t teach to wait until perfection, but to be cautious with experimental technology. It is possible (I´d even say: expectable) that the network will have massive flaws in the first years. We need to count on that and not simply rely on an untested technology.

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Also blessed are the old school pirates because they know the value of a usb stick. :wink:

15

Standing on the shoulders of (gi)ants, i.e. reserchers at Stanford:

Anternet

“The next day it occurred to me, ‘Oh wait, this is almost the same as how [Internet] protocols discover how much bandwidth is available for transferring a file!’” Prabhakar said. “The algorithm the ants were using to discover how much food there is available is essentially the same as that used in the Transmission Control Protocol.”

Dates from 2012, in 2015:

Each ant recognizes a few intruders, and the ants’ collective knowledge keeps the colony safe.

It would be terribly unwieldy for the cell to carry a molecule that matches every existing pathogen, so immune cells typically hunt only one type of intruder. It’s fine if a bug gets past one immune cell – the system knows it will inevitably spot the intruder. This approach is known as a distributed decision network.

Ants, it turns out, use a similar strategy to keep intruders from their nest, Gordon and coauthor Esponda, a computer scientist at the Instituto Tecnologico Autonomo de Mexico, write in their new paper.

Each ant has its own boundary between the scent of friends and foes, Gordon said. As they go through life, they first meet mostly ants that are nest-mates, and decide that they smell like friends. As they grow older, and head outside to forage, they are more likely to meet a foe. If the foe acts unfriendly, or attacks, its scent is classified as that of a foe. Later, when they encounter a friendly scent, they allow that ant to pass, but meeting a foe, the scent of that foe triggers an attack.

As with immune cells, individual ants have a limited capacity for storing this information. In the new model, Gordon and Esponda show that the safety of the colony relies on the ants’ overlapping collective knowledge.

“No one ant knows every foreigner, but because each ant knows a few foreigners, the whole colony knows how to keep foreigners out most of time,” Gordon said. “It’s not perfect, but it’s a lot cheaper.”

Also tried to find a quick answer in Nick Bostrom’s “Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies” - he doesn’t have one yet:

Networks and organizations

But what of the seemingly more fanciful idea that the Internet might one day “wake up”? Could the Internet become something more than just the backbone of a loosely integrated collective superintelligence—something more like a virtual skull housing an emerging unified super-intellect?

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Sorry for my late reply, had to work.

If you got a desktop or a laptop, surely you can buy 1 SAFEcoin to start farming. You could also do a job/task and get a SAFEcoin from someone else. There are 452M maidSAFEcoin right now, enough to get millions of people farming.

This is what i’m trying to say, if the farming rate is zero, doesn’t that mean that nobody will farm? With a pay to farm, they would have to pay 1000 times the SAFEcoins, before they could pull of this trick. Resources need to add value to the SAFE Network, but if they’re put in place to have a negative impact, we should have speedbumps. Especially at the start, we’re super vulnerable.

I’m curious who will be able to detect it? If there was a botnet among us, these last tests that we did how would we know?

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If all our reasoning amount to zero then of course your/any attack will work.

But we have to base any attack into reality. If you want a theoretical attack to explore things then say so. Which is it.

The kind of attack you are talking of is theory only and would not happen in our (current) environment.

So examining your attack it is exactly the situation of more than 80% of nodes owned by one entity and as such they have full control. To defeat this would require a significant change and slowing down of the network with more precise consensus.

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Just like they do with a number of things.

As to how is it detected then I already explained it. Once you bring in the randomness of people/connections/PC/households etc by the millions the ease of detection increases 10000 fold. Our network is being run by people who want to run it and none is looking at “how to detect it”. A botnet chewing through millions of home connections would be impossible to hide, detection by one is a certainty. Its only a question of how many minutes till noticed and how many days before its reported.

There are botnet honey pots run by the major virus companies and your botnet is likely to be seen in its infancy

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19

  1. Just because you have a computer does not mean you BOUGHT the computer. Have you not heard of the novel concept of a gift? You know this assumption that because you have x that you therefore can afford y has to go. You might have pooled money, or been gifted money, or inherted money or for whatever reason received the funds in a single instance not a repeated instance and so can only afford to buy the widgit, in this case a computer, once. Saying that because one has a computer one can afford an additional expense is a completely false assumption. Just because saying one can afford internet one can afford an additional expense is false.

  2. How are you to do a job/task to earn safecoin on the safe network if you can’t PUT to the SAFE network because you own no safecoin because you own no safecoin and cannot farm for safecoin?

  3. You seem to have the notion that we should make getting on the SAFE network dependent on the internet 1.0 or other network. Yes there are millions of safecoins right now but that won’t always be the case and your idea goes against the flow of data. You get paid safecoin for devoting resources to the network. You don’t pay safecoin in order to devote resources to the network.

  4. You are presuming the price of safecoin will remain cheap. It will not. Safecoin price will fluctuating. Indeed it may get very high in relation to a given fiat. So it may be infeasible to pay for it.

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And it will have the ring of the Nigerian Scam. You give me 1 coin as collateral (or pay fees) and I will give you coin after coin. How many will turn away because of this alone.

I agree that we have to view this from the novice, ignorant user who knows how to google and click links. They know little to nothing of SAFE or SAFEcoins and to expect them to “buy” a coin just so they can farm for coins so they can open an account!!! Might as well just tell them they have to buy coins on an exchange.

IF we were attracting only crypto savy people then this idea of paying to farm might fly, but we are not, we are after the folk who know not crypto or coins and provide an easy way into SAFE storing.

I agree that we have to have as low a barrier to farming and SAFE usage. And the current idea that to farm and surf SAFE only requires a vault or launcher to be installed is the better way. Thus coins are only needed to store data (which also sets up an account first time its done)

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