No, not Nicholas Cage.
Inevitably, bad actors will attempt to take advantage of our network. Unless we are proactive, it could really be devastating to the project.
Precedent
Helium is plagued by GPS spoofing. Scammers have installed hundreds of hotspots in a single room when they normally must be spaced 300 maters apart. They have raked in 10’s of millions in HNT. Helium was extremely slow to act and only attempted to fix the problem this last month.
Chia has been experiencing a “duststorm” for nearly a year. Their feeless system is being taken advantage of by creating millions of micro transactions. This is filling up the SSD’s in smaller nodes and forcing them offline (happened to me).
What will they attempt on us?
We don’t know exactly how people attempt to take advantage of us. But there are some obvious threats. I don’t have any qualms sharing these, people more clever than me will think of more sneaky things.
Some that come to mind:
Faking capacity - It is possible to trick an OS into thinking a drive is larger than it really is. This is a common ebay scam. It may also be possible to cheat on CPU or memory size.
OS download source - The OS may have a limited attack surface, but how secure is the site hosting the bootimage? Could it be replaced with something malicious?
Bandwidth Abuse - A 40U rack on a dial up connection adds nothing to the network and inflated the amount of TFT. People are really start to build up their server farms. I often check with them on their bandwidth and so far its been good. I know bandwidth monitoring is in the works but a close eye should be kept on this until then.
Lets brainstorm on solutions to these and identifying other potential weaknesses.
(note bandwidth discussion has been taking place on another thread)