The recent DDoS attack on some of the major websites on the internet has renewed interests in the decentralized internet. While there are multiple initiatives concerning blockchain technology and decentralized network in development, the DDoS attack is expected to accelerate the process.
The CTO of Golem, Piotr Janiuk has recently explained that by decentralizing the internet using peer to peer technology the chances of such attacks can be minimized. He believes that the attack was a result of an attacker or a group of attackers exploiting one or more single points of failures on the internet.
One such decentralized internet project is known as SAFE Network where safe stands for Secure Access for Everyone. The SAFE Network is powered using the unused hard drive space, processing power and data connection of its users. It uses MaidSafe crypto tokens as a medium of exchange on the network. By distributing data and processing power across the network, decentralized internet platform ensures much higher security and privacy to its users.
MaidSafe's CEO David Irvine was quoted by a tech publication saying,
"DDOS depends on a target, in SAFE the target is everyone's computers. An analogy would be DDOS is like swatting a large fly, in SAFE the large fly is a mass swarm of mossies which makes it hard even with 8 arms filled with fly swatters."
DDoS attacks involve hitting a server with tons to requests with an intention of overloading it and shutting it down. By doing so, the attacker effectively brings down the applications running on that server. However, in the case of MaidSafe, the Opportunistic Caching feature creates copies of requested data. This, in turn, speeds up the websites and other data feeds as the number of requests increases. Such a feature can make conventional DDoS attacks ineffective against decentralized internet protocols.