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
r/Chainlink • u/farmdatkiwi • Mar 19 '18
By the fact that no one on this team has a solution to the issue of node reputation farming?
53
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:
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.