A blockchain start-up, Gladius claims to have come up with a solution to prevent the dreaded DDoS attacks. The platform went live earlier yesterday.
Respite From DDoS Attacks
Gladius, a Washington D.C. based blockchain start-up claims to have come up with a solution that will help websites fight off a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. The platform was launched earlier on Monday.
Web-based applications have for long been plagued with the risk of being brought down by DDoS attacks. DDoS is a cyber attack in which a perpetrator makes a website unavailable to its intended users by overwhelming the target web server with fake traffic.
To execute a DDoS attack, a group of devices, collectively known as a botnet, is used to continuously send information packets to the target website resulting in the webpage being unavailable to users.
A Company Driven by Youngsters
The firm, led by a young entrepreneur Max Niebylski, was established in July 2017. Niebylski, Co-founder and CEO, was 18 when he started the company and currently leads a team of youngsters (the rest of the team is even younger). Gladius had raised $20 Million through an ICO in December last year.
“DDoS has never been solved in a way that makes sense,” said Niebylski, in an interview with VentureBeat. “Current providers are centralized. Botnets are decentralized. The providers try to fight decentralized attacks with centralized resources. With Gladius, we fight distributed attacks with a distributed solution.”
The firm just completed a private beta testing of the platform. The solution leverages the unused bandwidth available from participating organizations to defend against DDoS attacks. The firm has also tied up with Digital Ocean, a cloud service provider to conduct performance testing for large-scale attacks.
Niebylski said:
We can match 100 nodes or more to match the bandwidth of the attack.
He added:
Blockchains have been around a couple of years. What’s important are the incentives. Before, it was technically feasible to create a peer-to-peer network. But there were no ways to incentive the nodes to participate. With blockchain, it’s possible to make a payment in under 30 seconds to reward the nodes in real time for their protection.
Solution Architecture
The solution has been built on top of the Ethereum blockchain. The gladius solution layer is designed to handle the cyber-attacks while the transactions will be executed on the Ethereum network.
A study conducted by Ponemon Institute reveals that 64% of organizations say that the severity of cyber-attacks is on the rise. The average amount of downtime due to a DDoS attack is 54 minutes and the average cost for each minute of downtime is about $22,000. Gladius uses a distributed solution to scale up the resources required (Server infrastructure, bandwidth, space, power, and cooling) to fight an attack.
If the company’s claims are to be believed, the Gladius solution should be cheaper and more effective than what is currently available. If the firm can demonstrate its capability, it should come as a welcome relief to web-based business owners and empower Gladius to disrupt the cybersecurity sector.
Do you think a distributed blockchain based solution will be useful in preventing DDoS attacks from crashing a website? Let us know in the comments below.
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