What about a network attack by data flooding

Cybersecurity
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Let’s say malicious hackers want to cripple the network by flooding tons and tons of data on the network, and in essence fill up all the vaults with useless data. Let’s assume something large scale like a 10,000 zombie computer attack or maybe a rogue state with a lot of resources that doesn’t like an uncensored internet.

How would such an attack be mitigated?

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It costs money to store data.

In the old days spamming was free. Not anymore due to that advent of cryptocurrencies…

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3

Data flooding is called uploading and is a SAFE activity (pun intended).

That’s what uses (who upload) are supposed to do.

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You pay with Safecoin http://maidsafe.net/docs/Safecoin.pdf for each PUT (of data on the network).

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Could someone confirm my understanding:
In the event that a lot of data is placed on the network, to the degree that available space is consumed, the cost of storing data increases as availability of space decreases. Thus creating an inhibitor to over-flooding the network.
Though, this also incentivizes farmers to share more disk space with the network because they will get higher farming rates of SAFE coin.

Is that accurate?

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In essence that is my understanding too @westleyd

If one had enough SAFEcoin to start, it would be no use since the cost of uploading this data would dramatically increase as the available network resources drops below around 20% (IIRC). In other words one might estimate network to have xxx bytes of data available at a rate of y coins per z bytes. They then think they can fill the xxx bytes with y * ( xxx / z ) coins. But as the flood continues the y is increasing and so they only get so far before running out of coins. Maybe 50% of the way before they run out of coins.

The above maths is for showing the principle. The actual %age will be different and also depend on the rate of increase of farmers as farming rate also increases.

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7

That sounds about right.

The key thing is that to store data, you must pay to store… Thus attacking for the fun of attacking is expensive…

You do raise everyone else’s cost, but if you where storing garbage for the sake of flooding the network and eveyone else was storing actual useful data It would be far more worth it for them to pay than it would be for you to pay, just to burn money…

And yes, as the price increases, so does the incentive to farm, so in theory people would be setting up more vaults to prevent a shortage of space…