A Criminal Smart Contract for Distributed Denial of Service Attacks

Abstract

The rapid growth in the number of services invites exponentially increasing malicious traffic which aims to overwhelm a server. This attempt to exhaust the server of its resources is called a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack. The pseudonymity (pseudo-anonymity) of Blockchain can be either desirable or undesirable to society and this unique feature put together with the elimination of trusted intermediaries that smart contracts offer, appeals to the illegal side of the world. This paper sheds light on the “dark side” of smart contracts, i.e., how they are used to stimulate criminal activity, specifically, a contract to allow the terms and execution of a DDoS to take place in a secure community. Though this proposal endeavors to release a DDoS attack, it can be extended to other real-world crimes as well. Apart from this, our work also covers how this framework could be used for Selfish Mining.