Synonyms
Definition
A computational puzzle is a moderately hard problem, the answer of which can be computed within a reasonable time and verified efficiently. Such a problem is often given to a service requester to solve before the requested service is provided, which mitigates the threats of denial of service (DoS) attacks and other service abuses such as spam.
Background
Cynthia Dwork and Moni Naor were the first to come up with the idea of using a moderately hard but tractable function to price the sender of junk mails [1]. The terms “client puzzle” and “cryptographic puzzle” were coined by Ari Juels and John Brainard to describe their protocol for countering connection depletion attacks [2]. Before them, Ronald Rivest, Adi Shamir, and David Wagner also discussed the concept of “time-lock” puzzles for controlling when encrypted data can be decrypted [3].
Theory
Computation puzzles are typically built upon “weakened” cryptographic...
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Recommended Reading
Dwork C, Naor M (1992) Pricing via processing or combating junk mail. In Brickell E (ed) Proceedings of Advances in Cryptology—CRYPTO 92, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 1328:139–147. Springer, Berlin
Juels A, Brainard J (1999) Client puzzle: a cryptographic defense against connection depletion attacks. In Kent S (ed) Proceedings of the 16th Annual Network and Distributed System Security Symposium, pp 151–165
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Wang, X. (2011). Computational Puzzles. In: van Tilborg, H.C.A., Jajodia, S. (eds) Encyclopedia of Cryptography and Security. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-5906-5_264
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