Update call, just return, 35M cycle consume!

Developers
1

How to avoid DDOS attack of cycle consume!

How to avoid cycle consume with no sense?

1 Like
2

As far as I understood; if you trap the execution of an update call ( throw it would not decrease the cycles;

Example:

public shared (msg) func updateSomething(): async () {
    if(msg.caller != admin) { // throw and won't spend }
    // update state and will spend
}
3

I just use assert and throw, not work, cycle will be used.

4

35M cycles is 0.000035 $, isn’t it? Someone needs to send a lot of requests to your canister to make that noticable.

For update calls (but not inter-canister calls), you can use the canister_inspect_message feature to prevent calls from event entering the Internet Computer. This way you would not be charged at all. This is not available in Motoko, though.

For inter-canister calls you can find solace in the fact that the call costs the caller much more than what you pay for a quick rejection. To plug even that I expect that the cycle accounting will charge the first few million cycles not to the canister (but rather consider them paid by the caller’s fee for sending a message). Then your swift rejection will be free.

3 Likes
5

Thank you, canister_inspect_message is a good choose, but code is written by motoko, so sad!

6

It’s not as bad. Most canisters have some public method that anyone can call (e.g. registration). Once you have a single such message, and attacker can make you spend cycles, and you just have to live with that (and can stop worrying about counter measures). So as long as rejecting quickly is cheap enough to make the attacks practically too expensive, it’s kinda fine.

7

Maybe so. just go ahead and look.

8

IMO It is bad. I think that when ANY amount of $ can be lost by serving malafide requests, it totally exposes up a surface vector for attack. This should be prevented at the IC level in partnership with canisters.

9

Every attack has a cost. It is not feasible for an attacker to drain any canister out of cycles if it will require more cycles to execute.

1 Like
10

Are there any examples of how to use canister_inspect_message?