{"id":893,"date":"2017-09-15T21:15:06","date_gmt":"2017-09-15T21:15:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/?p=893"},"modified":"2017-09-15T21:36:49","modified_gmt":"2017-09-15T21:36:49","slug":"could-someone-launch-a-ddos-attack-in-a-smart-contract-probably-not","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/2017\/09\/15\/could-someone-launch-a-ddos-attack-in-a-smart-contract-probably-not\/","title":{"rendered":"Could someone launch a DDOS attack in a smart contract? (Probably not.)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A question from a reader:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Could someone launch a ddos attack in a smart contract? (aimed at some outside website, you could probably ddos the ethereum blockchain just by making a lot of transactions).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>The usual relation of cryptocurrency to DDOS (distributed <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Denial-of-service_attack\">denial-of-service<\/a>) attacks is when someone threatens you with a DDOS unless you send them bitcoins. But could you do this automatically?<\/p>\n<p>As we know, the huge problem with <i>any<\/i> real world application of smart contracts is the \u201coracle problem&#8221;: how to get real world data into the program without requiring human judgement.<\/p>\n<p>Getting data out of a smart contract platform is less conceptually difficult, but certainly isn&#8217;t a feature of, say, Ethereum. You <em>could<\/em> build a separate system to DDOS people and have it act on the state of a particular Ethereum smart contract. But I know of no examples, and there isn&#8217;t a way to access, let alone hammer, an arbitrary site from the Ethereum blockchain as-is. (And you&#8217;d be spending ether on &#8220;gas&#8221; for the smart contract to be able to run to do this.)<\/p>\n<p>You could buy a DDOS from an existing \u201cwebsite stress test vendor&#8221; using cryptocurrency, of course. Though even they don&#8217;t like cryptocurrency, greatly preferring PayPal (until they get kicked off). (<a href=\"https:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/1508.03410\">Research<\/a>, Krebs&#8217; <a href=\"http:\/\/krebsonsecurity.com\/2015\/08\/stress-testing-the-booter-services-financially\/\">summary<\/a>.)<\/p>\n<br><br><div align=\"center\"><p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.patreon.com\/bePatron?u=8420236\"><img src=\"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/10\/become_a_patron_button.svg\" alt=\"Become a Patron!\" title=\"Become a Patron!\" width=217 height=51><\/a><br><p style=\"align:center;\" class=\"patreon-badge\"><i>Your subscriptions keep this site going. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.patreon.com\/bePatron?u=8420236\">Sign up today!<\/a><\/i><\/p><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A question from a reader: Could someone launch a DDOS attack in a smart contract?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[81,82,83],"class_list":["post-893","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorised","tag-ddos","tag-ethereum","tag-smart-contract"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/893","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=893"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/893\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":968,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/893\/revisions\/968"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=893"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=893"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=893"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}