Non-Parallelizable and Non-Interactive Client Puzzles from Modular Square Roots

—Denial of Service (DoS) attacks aiming to exhaust the resources of a server by overwhelming it with bogus requests have become a serious threat. Especially protocols that rely on public key cryptography and perform expensive authentication handshakes may be an easy target. A well-known countermeasure against DoS attacks are client puzzles. The victimized server demands from the clients to commit computing resources before it processes their requests. To get service, a client must solve a cryptographic puzzle and submit the right solution. Existing client puzzle schemes have some drawbacks. They are either parallelizable, coarse-grained or can be used only interactively. In case of interactive client puzzles where the server poses the challenge an attacker might mount a counterattack on the clients by injecting fake packets containing bogus puzzle parameters. In this paper we introduce a novel scheme for client puzzles which relies on the computation of square roots modulo a prime. M...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: ARESEC
• Authors: Yves Igor Jerschow, Martin Mauve
• Keywords: ARESEC 2011, CPU Cores, Easy Target, Puzzle Schemes