Modular square root puzzles: Design of non-parallelizable and non-interactive client puzzles

Denial of Service (DoS) attacks aiming to exhaust the resources of a server by overwhelming it with bogus requests have become a serious threat. Especially protocols that rely on public key cryptography and perform expensive authentication handshakes may be an easy target. A well-known countermeasure against resource depletion attacks are client puzzles. The victimized server demands from the clients to commit computing resources before it processes their requests. To get service, a client must solve a cryptographic puzzle and submit the right solution. Existing client puzzle schemes have some drawbacks. They are either parallelizable, coarse-grained or can be used only interactively. In case of interactive client puzzles where the server poses the challenge an attacker might mount a counterattack on the clients by injecting faked packets with bogus puzzle parameters bearing the server’s sender address. In this paper we introduce a novel scheme for client puzzles which relies on the computation of square roots modulo a prime. Modular square root puzzles are non-parallelizable, i. e., the solution cannot be obtained faster than scheduled by distributing the puzzle to multiple machines or CPU cores, and they can be employed both interactively and non-interactively. Our puzzles provide polynomial granularity and compact solution and verification functions. Benchmark results demonstrate the feasibility of our approach to mitigate DoS attacks on hosts in 1 or even 10 Gbit networks. In addition, we show how to raise the efficiency of our puzzle scheme by introducing a bandwidth-based cost factor for the client. Furthermore, we also investigate the construction of client puzzles from modular cube roots.