What are some unique strategies to prevent Cycle Drainage Attacks on ICP canisters?

Developers Rust
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"I’m building a DeFi application on the Internet Computer (ICP) and want to implement strong protection mechanisms against cycle drainage attacks. I’m already aware of common prevention methods such as:

  1. Rate limiting (per-user, per-IP request restrictions).
  2. Cycle tracking and alerts (monitoring cycle usage and setting thresholds).
  3. Gas-like fee models (charging cycles for expensive operations).
  4. Auto-replenishment and threshold checks (to avoid sudden depletion).
  5. Certified Queries (to optimize read operations and save cycles).
  6. Request validation and blacklisting (blocking abusive users or malformed requests).

However, I’m looking for uncommon, creative, or advanced strategies that go beyond these basic protections.

  • Have you implemented any non-traditional methods to mitigate cycle drainage attacks?
  • Are there any smart contract design patterns or canister-level optimizations that have worked well for you?
  • How can AI, ML, or anomaly detection help in automatically blocking suspicious activity?
  • Are there any hardware-based or cryptographic solutions that could prevent excessive cycle consumption?
  • Any thoughts on using multi-canister architectures or sharding to limit exposure to attacks?

I would love to hear the community’s insights on this, especially those who have dealt with or mitigated such attacks successfully."_

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The most obvious and simple solution to me has always been limiting the use of your canister to only OTHER canisters and requiring that they send cycles with their requests. This would add some latency if each request went through a wallet canister, but it solves a number of issues around securing a service.

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