Proof of Work (PoW) Support in Onionbalance
Proposal 327 brings a Proof of Work (PoW) defense for Onion Services. It's currently implemented on C Tor and plans for implementing on Arti are well underway.
This feature is advertised to clients through a new descriptor field:
"pow-params" SP type SP seed-b64 SP suggested-effort
SP expiration-time NL
For services relying on Onionbalance, though, this field is still unsupported, since:
- The frontend service does not implement this field.
- Clients cannot fetch the backend's descriptors to check if
pow-params
is present. - Currently the frontend service does not check this field on each backend service.
- The backend services have no way to agree in shared parameters such as
seed-b64
,suggested-effort
andexpiration-time
.
This issue is intended to track the current status of PoW support in Onionbalance, if feasible.