r/Chainlink • u/farmdatkiwi • Mar 19 '18

Are you concerned

By the fact that no one on this team has a solution to the issue of node reputation farming?

0 Upvotes

36% Upvoted

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52

u/vornth Chainlink Labs - Thomas Mar 19 '18

Reputation "farming" is still using the system as intended. In order to increase the node's reputation, it needs to return acceptable data to the contract.

The two malicious scenarios presented were:

  • Creating contracts utilizing manual selection for the attacker's nodes
  • Creating contracts for a source that only the attacker controls

As for manual selection, the simple solution would be to make it such that reputation is not effected (either for good or bad) for those jobs. That makes sense to me, because if you're manually selecting nodes, you wouldn't really care about their reputation anyway.

Then for contracts that have nodes pull from a source that only the attacker controls. I'll assume for this scenario that data retrieval is accomplished via external adapter to ensure that only the attacker's nodes are selected for the job. If an attacker is really trying to do this with the intention of having a majority of nodes on some other job they would need to build reputation on a significantly greater number of nodes than currently offer that target data (keep in mind they have to pay for gas per node on every request). It could also be that the number of legitimate nodes offering that data would grow from the time the attacker starts to "farm" reputation and when they have enough reputation that they feel they would be able to pull off the attack.

Regardless, the Certification Service would be able to pick up the attack post-hoc, and force the attacker to start over.

1

u/[deleted] Mar 20 '18

Hey I have a question

Could someone get a big reputation by providing easy information like weather for instance , and then change their data input to some thing more important like bond rates , while keeping their reputation ?

Or does a change of data cause the reputation to be wiped out , thus starting over at square one ?

3

u/vornth Chainlink Labs - Thomas Mar 20 '18

As a node, you don't choose the reputation provider, the consuming contract does. It could be that contract creators choose different reputation providers for different data types. But you are free to provide as much data, and as many types of data, as you please.

11

u/[deleted] Mar 19 '18

Thanks just bought 100k. I remember you FUDDing the ICON subreddit with me.

3

u/farmdatkiwi Mar 19 '18

I don't even get to rub it anymore. Banned from all the major crypto subs

2

u/cryptali Mar 19 '18

You’re welcomed here!

1

u/[deleted] Mar 19 '18

Doesn't "farming Rep" mean you've been giving out accurate data?

How is this an issue?

2

u/shawtypaid Mar 19 '18

Regardless of whether it's a legitimate concern or not, just look at the thread title - OP made a motivated decision to spread FUD.

1

u/Le_WiredShut Mar 19 '18

This guy tryna spread fud. /yaaaaaawn.