

Anatomy of a Parasitic Computer (2002) - TriinT
http://www.ddj.com/184404947

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mustpax
If you can extract computing power out of IP checksums, you should be able to
extract _a lot more_ from cryptographic handshakes, like say SSL. Is this SHA1
valid? Let’s ask Amazon.com. (Actually I think they run an MD5 variant of SSL,
but you get the point.)

However, you might get your IP blacklisted pretty quickly if you fail the SSL
handshake too many times. SSL used to be pretty CPU heavy especially in the
old days, so there are bound to be some DoS preventing load-balancers in front
of the SSL ports.

The biggest problem here of course is that the marginal cost of CPU cycles is
quite lower than bandwidth (which is why web servers support GZIP/Deflate for
resources). This scheme mostly allows us to convert bandwidth to processing
power. I wonder how this ties back to the age-old memory vs. processing trade-
off.

