Theta awarded patent application approval for USPTO Number 17/224,109 (“THETA-1005”) — Preventing denial-of-service attacks in decentralized edge networks using verifiable delay functions (VDFs) to prevent malicious attacks.
Theta Labs has just received patent application approval for USPTO Application Number 17/224,109 (“THETA-1005”): “Preventing denial-of-service attacks in decentralized edge networks using verifiable delay functions (VDFs)”. The invention featured in this patent introduces significantly improved protection against attacks for decentralized networks like Theta Network. This patent approval follows previous Theta patents issued for decentralized data streaming and delivery, ultra-high transaction throughput micropayments, methods and systems for peer node discovery, and decentralized DRM via NFTs, creating a portfolio of patents to further differentiate and protect the Theta technology and ecosystem.
Client-server and peer-to-peer blockchain networks may be vulnerable to denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. A DoS attack refers to a technique to disrupt legitimate users’ access to the network. In some cases, the attack can be performed by overloading one or more nodes of the network with a large amount of data requests, leading to network congestion.
The proposed systems featured in this patent are used to reduce the likelihood of such attacks using verifiable delay functions (VDFs). VDFs refer to functions that require a predetermined number of computational cycles to complete. While VDFs and PoW/PoS both require an evaluator to spend some time to compute a puzzle, VDFs may involve sequential computations which cannot be parallelized, making specialized hardware unable to substantially speed up the puzzle computation. This mechanism can also be extended to a blockchain supported decentralized peer-to-peer data delivery network with digital rights management (DRM), non-fungible tokens (NFT) and decentralized finance (DeFi) applications.
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