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Topic: The TRUTH about Darkcoin: ZERO Anonymity, EASY DOS attacks, & Amateur code base! - page 2. (Read 9018 times)

hero member
Activity: 966
Merit: 1003
Quote
Darkcoin is prone to several cost-less DOS attacks that can destroy the whole network.

If its true do it and I'll pay you. I hold a certain interest in dark coin competition. Also it would be better for everyone involved if this monster was killed before it becomes any bigger and hurts even more people. But lets just say ill believe its THIS easy when i see it myself.

Cool, hiring someone to do criminal activities for your benefit - check with your momma first if she thinks it's a good idea.

Criminal? How? I mean if its some sort of crime than never mind. What law are you referencing?

In my country it's called "telecommunication interference" (word-for-word translation), which is a crime. Depends on the country where the affected party is I suppose.

Well in that case what do we even need byzantine fault tolerance for? Lets just make it illegal to interfere with the network! That's got to be cheaper than all this "mining" nonsense. Cheesy

No but seriously legality aside, if it really was easy to destroy the network it would be in everyone's best interest for someone to do this. That would make w/e value it had bubble value and its better to pop a small bubble than a big one.

Yes, I agree - obviously a coin should be tolerant even to illegal attacks.

OP's original claim that "Darkcoin is prone to several cost-less DOS attacks that can destroy the whole network" is not true though. I don't know if it was true back when the claim was made, but I know that after OP was posted the dev team went bug hunting and fixed several bugs that could've been used to stall some of the functionality or game the masternode payments to benefit a dishonest masternode. When developing new technology problems are bound to happen, and that has been priced in as we can remember from the fork issues and the subsequent price drop last summer. Nevertheless, it was a good thing that the OP was posted back then as it motivated the team to set developing new features aside for a moment and go through the codebase and clean out all bugs they could find.
zsp
full member
Activity: 181
Merit: 100
I always thought Darkcoin is a good one.
legendary
Activity: 1722
Merit: 1217
Quote
Darkcoin is prone to several cost-less DOS attacks that can destroy the whole network.

If its true do it and I'll pay you. I hold a certain interest in dark coin competition. Also it would be better for everyone involved if this monster was killed before it becomes any bigger and hurts even more people. But lets just say ill believe its THIS easy when i see it myself.

Cool, hiring someone to do criminal activities for your benefit - check with your momma first if she thinks it's a good idea.

Criminal? How? I mean if its some sort of crime than never mind. What law are you referencing?

In my country it's called "telecommunication interference" (word-for-word translation), which is a crime. Depends on the country where the affected party is I suppose.

Well in that case what do we even need byzantine fault tolerance for? Lets just make it illegal to interfere with the network! That's got to be cheaper than all this "mining" nonsense. Cheesy

No but seriously legality aside, if it really was easy to destroy the network it would be in everyone's best interest for someone to do this. That would make w/e value it had bubble value and its better to pop a small bubble than a big one.
hero member
Activity: 966
Merit: 1003
Quote
Darkcoin is prone to several cost-less DOS attacks that can destroy the whole network.

If its true do it and I'll pay you. I hold a certain interest in dark coin competition. Also it would be better for everyone involved if this monster was killed before it becomes any bigger and hurts even more people. But lets just say ill believe its THIS easy when i see it myself.

Cool, hiring someone to do criminal activities for your benefit - check with your momma first if she thinks it's a good idea.

Criminal? How? I mean if its some sort of crime than never mind. What law are you referencing?

In my country it's called "telecommunication interference" (word-for-word translation), which is a crime. Depends on the country where the affected party is I suppose.
G2M
sr. member
Activity: 280
Merit: 250
Activity: 616
estimated coins max, is 22,000,000 at some unknown point in the future.

Obviously if all of them were in use for masternodes, it likely wouldn't be a currency at that point, but I'd say it's still a maximum.

So, maybe, an estimated maximum of 22k masternodes then?

add: the odds I was referring to were just that, odds. We can imagine that there are "one in a trillion odds" for someone, though there are not that many people in the world. sorry if that was taken to indicate there would be >90k masternodes ever, because there won't.
legendary
Activity: 2282
Merit: 1050
Monero Core Team

The biggest weakness of Darkcoin I think is if the regime decides that coin tumbling is illegal and akin to money laundering and all it will take is a quick court order to go yank all those Amazon cloud servers hosting the Masternodes real fast.

...and the biggest strength is that masternodes are decentralised so they can be set up in 5 minutes on any other of 1-2 billion computing units around the world. The critical thing that secures a masternode isn't a poxy Amazon cloud server, it's a blockchain address containing 1000 coins (which isn't hosted on a cloud server  Wink ).


So, the actual capacity of DRK to fill these computing units is .0011% as an absolute maximum of number of computing units (2 billion) that will be a masternode.

Your argument would have better off just mentioning that there are 1-2 billion units capable of decentralizing the network, if we were to agree on the fact that likely 90% of those 1-2 billion computing units are easily compromised by air gaps, numerous hardware backdoors, and then even more software vulnerabilities and backdoors.

So really, the critical thing is that theres a blockchain hosted by a node...because the actual chances of a single masternode ending up on non compromized software based on chance would be 10% x .0011% I'd wager. So .00011% of all masternodes, which are fairish odds of about 1 in 91k masternodes would end up on noncompromised hardware and software with 1-2 billion users and other numbers pulled totally out of my ass.

I mean if 1-2 billion people were to use darkcoin, they're just not all gonna host masternodes. It would probably be from them that the network remained decentralized, rather than a few ten thousand masternodes at that point.




The theoretical limit to the number of DRK masternodes at this point in time is 5157 and then there would only be 101 DRK in total left to be used as a currency. http://coinmarketcap.com/currencies// I fail to see where people are getting a few ten thousand masternodes from.
G2M
sr. member
Activity: 280
Merit: 250
Activity: 616

The biggest weakness of Darkcoin I think is if the regime decides that coin tumbling is illegal and akin to money laundering and all it will take is a quick court order to go yank all those Amazon cloud servers hosting the Masternodes real fast.

...and the biggest strength is that masternodes are decentralised so they can be set up in 5 minutes on any other of 1-2 billion computing units around the world. The critical thing that secures a masternode isn't a poxy Amazon cloud server, it's a blockchain address containing 1000 coins (which isn't hosted on a cloud server  Wink ).


So, the actual capacity of DRK to fill these computing units is .0011% as an absolute maximum of number of computing units (2 billion) that will be a masternode.

Your argument would have better off just mentioning that there are 1-2 billion units capable of decentralizing the network, if we were to agree on the fact that likely 90% of those 1-2 billion computing units are easily compromised by air gaps, numerous hardware backdoors, and then even more software vulnerabilities and backdoors.

So really, the critical thing is that theres a blockchain hosted by a node...because the actual chances of a single masternode ending up on non compromized software based on chance would be 10% x .0011% I'd wager. So .00011% of all masternodes, which are fairish odds of about 1 in 91k masternodes would end up on noncompromised hardware and software with 1-2 billion users and other numbers pulled totally out of my ass.

I mean if 1-2 billion people were to use darkcoin, they're just not all gonna host masternodes. It would probably be from them that the network remained decentralized, rather than a few ten thousand masternodes at that point.


legendary
Activity: 3066
Merit: 1188

The biggest weakness of Darkcoin I think is if the regime decides that coin tumbling is illegal and akin to money laundering and all it will take is a quick court order to go yank all those Amazon cloud servers hosting the Masternodes real fast.

...and the biggest strength is that masternodes are decentralised so they can be set up in 5 minutes on any other of 1-2 billion computing units around the world. The critical thing that secures a masternode isn't a poxy Amazon cloud server, it's a blockchain address containing 1000 coins (which isn't hosted on a cloud server  Wink ).
legendary
Activity: 1246
Merit: 1000
The biggest weakness of Darkcoin I think is if the regime decides that coin tumbling is illegal and akin to money laundering and all it will take is a quick court order to go yank all those Amazon cloud servers hosting the Masternodes real fast.
legendary
Activity: 3066
Merit: 1188

This thread is gold to be honest.  I'll bump this in 6 months if nobody else has and we'll see what is what.

Most of the FUD is out of date, incorrect or just lies.

Amen to that.
legendary
Activity: 1722
Merit: 1002
Decentralize Everything
This thread is gold to be honest.  I'll bump this in 6 months if nobody else has and we'll see what is what.

Most of the FUD is out of date, incorrect or just lies.  Why not pick on the real shortcomings of DRK?  Dark supporters discuss these issues openly and the dev team to do list gives a few more pointers towards real (fixable) problems.

Problem is that the truth is not inflammatory if everybody agrees with it and the issues are being dealt with.

legendary
Activity: 2422
Merit: 1451
Leading Crypto Sports Betting & Casino Platform
Why do all accusative topics have to be self-moderated? I'm feeling like this is going to be like the "ltc is dead" topic where darkota deletes everything positive about litecoin.
legendary
Activity: 1722
Merit: 1217
Quote
Darkcoin is prone to several cost-less DOS attacks that can destroy the whole network.

If its true do it and I'll pay you. I hold a certain interest in dark coin competition. Also it would be better for everyone involved if this monster was killed before it becomes any bigger and hurts even more people. But lets just say ill believe its THIS easy when i see it myself.

Cool, hiring someone to do criminal activities for your benefit - check with your momma first if she thinks it's a good idea.

Criminal? How? I mean if its some sort of crime than never mind. What law are you referencing?
hero member
Activity: 966
Merit: 1003

Absolutely not true. Please dont tell lies in an attempt to invalidate my words.

Ok, let's see..


This "pre-anonymization" is mixing

Yes, true so far..


and mixing takes time

Still true..


If darkcoins anonymity was cut off, youd see all "premixed"(coins that havent been mixed yet) darkcoins, and be able to trace back all premixed darkcoins through the blockchain.

Now this doesn't even make any sense. First of all, "premixed" coins are not "coins that havent been mixed yet". Second, if "anonymity was cut off" (I guess you mean the masternodes were all ddos'ed), that wouldn't help you to interpret the blockchain at all. The anonymous transactions that have already happened, stay anonymous. And the anonymous coins you already have, will be anonymous even if you send them while all the masternodes (except for the attacker's) are down.
newbie
Activity: 28
Merit: 0
do you really think so? If someone wanted to destroy darkcoin's anonymity to say, catch someone whos engaging in illegal activity, then they(law enforcement) would probably have no issue ddosing all the masternodes, and what makes it even easier is that all the masternode's ip's are in the open.

Problem for trying to deanonymize DRK by ddos'ing is that the coins are pre-anonymized before they can be used.

So people will have anonymous coins in their wallet, and someone starts the attack and manages to take out every masternode except their own. People will send their anonymous coins to purchase whatever, and the attacker will be none the wiser as the coins and transactions are already anonymous. At that point people would notice the number of masternodes dropping from > 2000 to 20 for example, and realize what's going on, and wouldn't try to anonymize their standard coins. I've suggested earlier that the wallet would automatically detect this and prevent the user from mixing their coins while the attack is going on, and I believe it's a feature that will come at some point. So, the outcome would be that someone has just spent a lot of time and resources for no gain.

Absolutely not true. Please dont tell lies in an attempt to invalidate my words. This "pre-anonymization" is mixing, and mixing takes time(Ive used darksend before). If darkcoins anonymity was cut off, youd see all "premixed"(coins that havent been mixed yet) darkcoins, and be able to trace back all premixed darkcoins through the blockchain.

So again, you can end darkcoins "anonymity" and trace back the coins on the blockchain.
hero member
Activity: 966
Merit: 1003
do you really think so? If someone wanted to destroy darkcoin's anonymity to say, catch someone whos engaging in illegal activity, then they(law enforcement) would probably have no issue ddosing all the masternodes, and what makes it even easier is that all the masternode's ip's are in the open.

Problem for trying to deanonymize DRK by ddos'ing is that the coins are pre-anonymized before they can be used.

So people will have anonymous coins in their wallet, and someone starts the attack and manages to take out every masternode except their own. People will send their anonymous coins to purchase whatever, and the attacker will be none the wiser as the coins and transactions are already anonymous. At that point people would notice the number of masternodes dropping from > 2000 to 20 for example, and realize what's going on, and wouldn't try to anonymize their standard coins. I've suggested earlier that the wallet would automatically detect this and prevent the user from mixing their coins while the attack is going on, and I believe it's a feature that will come at some point. So, the outcome would be that someone has just spent a lot of time and resources for no gain.
hero member
Activity: 966
Merit: 1003
Quote
Darkcoin is prone to several cost-less DOS attacks that can destroy the whole network.

If its true do it and I'll pay you. I hold a certain interest in dark coin competition. Also it would be better for everyone involved if this monster was killed before it becomes any bigger and hurts even more people. But lets just say ill believe its THIS easy when i see it myself.

Cool, hiring someone to do criminal activities for your benefit - check with your momma first if she thinks it's a good idea.
sr. member
Activity: 1078
Merit: 270
Darkcoin is such a scam. I never put a penny into it.
newbie
Activity: 28
Merit: 0
I normally stay well clear of these debates, for obvious reasons, but I do get frustrated when I see well-articulated responses from people who are clearly intelligent advocating this obviously broken architecture, mostly through much hand-waving and placating each other.

Masternodes have to be available and connected to in real time in order to be used. Mixing is based entirely on their availability. Thus, in order to control a substantial number of masternodes one merely has to own a handful, and make the rest of the masternode network unreachable.

For even a script-kiddie-level attacker these techniques and funds are easily found.

Need to render 1100 masternodes unreachable? No problem - SNMP amplification attacks will let you use a handful of boxes to amplify the bandwidth under your control. When a datacenter sees a clear flood of traffic for a particular IP address at the datacenter their response is always automatic and the same - their upstream data provider blackholes that IP address at the upstream bordergate. This means that you can use SNMP or DNS amplification attacks to render a dedicated machine (never mind a VPS) inoperable and unreachable to the outside world.

The most critical take away for you today is that this problem is unsolvable at the userland level. In other words, no matter how much dev worship there is there isn't a magical line of code that can be written that can prevent amplification attacks from devices and servers that are unrelated to and unconnected to the Darkcoin network. It is something that cannot be controlled or influenced.

The solution would literally be for Darkcoin to scrap masternodes and go back to the proverbial drawing board to find an architecture that uses passive blockchain mixing or similar, but I suspect it is too late and there are too many stubborn heads for that.

The problem I see with this is.

Say there are 1,240 master nodes on the network. Lets say they are each feeding off a 1Gb pipe

In order to take out 1,240 masternodes you would need at least 1,240Gbps sustained ddos attack. Pretty hard to pull off

You would also have to own a few masternodes to pull off the attack. Therefore making an sizeable investment. And then attempting to destory the value of that investment

Your essentially saying the bitcoin network is just as vulnerable. If thats the case you could ddos 1,240 pools and gain 51% hashing power. Its just not as easy as your making it seem I dont think

do you really think so? If someone wanted to destroy darkcoin's anonymity to say, catch someone whos engaging in illegal activity, then they(law enforcement) would probably have no issue ddosing all the masternodes, and what makes it even easier is that all the masternode's ip's are in the open.

There are currently too many barriers for this kind of attack to even make sense. Even governments have spending oversight (lax as it is)
I'd like to see the agent in charge try to explain expenditure in the 10 million range , just to catch one or three traders of 50k worth of DRK.  

Really? 10million dollars is pocket change to a government that "controls" a country with a GDP of 17 trillion(America), and yearly budgets in the high multi- billions. I have no doubt in my mind that they would ddos darkcoin's masternodes if it meant that they could catch a serious drugdealer or terrorist for example. The difference between ddosing darkcoin and bitcoins nodes, is that darkcoin's masternodes is what gives darkcoin its "anonymity", and when those nodes are gone or limited(not a lot of nodes), its anonymity is gone as well.
legendary
Activity: 882
Merit: 1000
I normally stay well clear of these debates, for obvious reasons, but I do get frustrated when I see well-articulated responses from people who are clearly intelligent advocating this obviously broken architecture, mostly through much hand-waving and placating each other.

Masternodes have to be available and connected to in real time in order to be used. Mixing is based entirely on their availability. Thus, in order to control a substantial number of masternodes one merely has to own a handful, and make the rest of the masternode network unreachable.

For even a script-kiddie-level attacker these techniques and funds are easily found.

Need to render 1100 masternodes unreachable? No problem - SNMP amplification attacks will let you use a handful of boxes to amplify the bandwidth under your control. When a datacenter sees a clear flood of traffic for a particular IP address at the datacenter their response is always automatic and the same - their upstream data provider blackholes that IP address at the upstream bordergate. This means that you can use SNMP or DNS amplification attacks to render a dedicated machine (never mind a VPS) inoperable and unreachable to the outside world.

The most critical take away for you today is that this problem is unsolvable at the userland level. In other words, no matter how much dev worship there is there isn't a magical line of code that can be written that can prevent amplification attacks from devices and servers that are unrelated to and unconnected to the Darkcoin network. It is something that cannot be controlled or influenced.

The solution would literally be for Darkcoin to scrap masternodes and go back to the proverbial drawing board to find an architecture that uses passive blockchain mixing or similar, but I suspect it is too late and there are too many stubborn heads for that.

The problem I see with this is.

Say there are 1,240 master nodes on the network. Lets say they are each feeding off a 1Gb pipe

In order to take out 1,240 masternodes you would need at least 1,240Gbps sustained ddos attack. Pretty hard to pull off

You would also have to own a few masternodes to pull off the attack. Therefore making an sizeable investment. And then attempting to destory the value of that investment

Your essentially saying the bitcoin network is just as vulnerable. If thats the case you could ddos 1,240 pools and gain 51% hashing power. Its just not as easy as your making it seem I dont think

do you really think so? If someone wanted to destroy darkcoin's anonymity to say, catch someone whos engaging in illegal activity, then they(law enforcement) would probably have no issue ddosing all the masternodes, and what makes it even easier is that all the masternode's ip's are in the open.

There are currently too many barriers for this kind of attack to even make sense. Even governments have spending oversight (lax as it is)
I'd like to see the agent in charge try to explain expenditure in the 10 million range , just to catch one or three traders of 50k worth of DRK.  
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