DDoS attacks will be too expensive to be made thanks to the patent that Amazon will have

Recently, in a press release, it was announced that the company founded by Jeff Bezos, Amazon, has requested to acquire a patent for a new system that is based on the technology developed for Bitcoin. The system of Proof of Work (or PoW) will seek to avoid direct attacks to the servers. Specifically, it will counteract Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks.

Much of Bitcoin’s success is not only due to its commercialization in global markets or its traceability in all kinds of businesses, but also, there is a large number of tools, applications, ideas and patents that have been generated around the world, using the technology on which it is sustained. In this way, many of their ideas and creations are of benefit to many companies that do not necessarily want to be linked to the cryptocurrency.

In technical terms, the PoW, or Work Test System, is the central algorithm used by Bitcoin’s system and other cryptocurrencies such as Litecoin and Dogecoin, a cryptocurrency derived from the first digital currency mentioned.

In the same vein, Amazon seeks to reduce attacks on its platform by purchasing the patent for a specific configuration of PoW, and thus create a technique to enable Merkle trees. About the use of the patent, this feature can be specified: “One way to mitigate these attacks is to configure a service which requests to incur some type of expense, in order to discourage participations in the attack”.

The so-called Merkle trees are an important part of blockchain’s functionality, since they support the processing of information, allow a correct verification of the data and reinforce the structure where all the places of reception of information are supported.

In this sense, taking into account all the necessary resources, time and electricity power, this would be a very expensive job because of a great computing power to develop and create a Merkle tree is absolutely needed.

This is the reason why Amazon firmly believes that in order to conduct a DDoS attack, the enormous amount of resources that would be necessary is overwhelming and unfeasible. Therefore, it would end diminishing or eradicating the attacks in this way.

Now, in the case of the Amazon patent, all users will have to build their own Merkle tree, seconds before entering the website within some of their servers. For a single person who wants to do this, the cost could be minimal, but for an entire organization that wants to make a DDoS attack, it would take a considerable amount of computational resources and hundreds of weeks to do it. This will be extremely expensive and unlikely to happen, according to the company.

These movements that Amazon has made recently, show some interest in these new technologies and, in particular, in Bitcoin. Blockchain technology has proved to be very useful to improve security, process information and even develop new forms of growth in different platforms. However, Amazon has not given clues, even, if it considers or not to use the payment with cryptocurrencies on its platform.

By María Rodríguez

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