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Concept
Hashcash
Summary
Hashcash is a proof-of-work system used to limit E-mail spam and denial-of-service attacks. Hashcash was proposed in 1997 by Adam Back and described more formally in Back's 2002 paper "Hashcash - A Denial of Service Counter-Measure".
The idea "...to require a user to compute a moderately hard, but not intractable function..." was proposed by Cynthia Dwork and Moni Naor in their 1992 paper "Pricing via Processing or Combatting Junk Mail".
Hashcash is a cryptographic hash-based proof-of-work algorithm that requires a selectable amount of work to compute, but the proof can be verified efficiently. For email uses, a textual encoding of a hashcash stamp is added to the header of an email to prove the sender has expended a modest amount of CPU time calculating the stamp prior to sending the email. In other words, as the sender has taken a certain amount of time to generate the stamp and send the email, it is unlikely that they are a spammer. The receiver can, at negligible computational cost, verify that the stamp is valid. However, the only known way to find a header with the necessary properties is brute force, trying random values until the answer is found; though testing an individual string is easy, satisfactory answers are rare enough that it will require a substantial number of tries to find the answer.
The hypothesis is that spammers, whose business model relies on their ability to send large numbers of emails with very little cost per message, will cease to be profitable if there is even a small cost for each spam they send. Receivers can verify whether a sender made such an investment and use the results to help filter email.
The header line looks something like this:
X-Hashcash: 1:20:1303030600:anni@cypherspace.org::McMybZIhxKXu57jd:ckvi
The header contains:
ver: Hashcash format version, 1 (which supersedes version 0).
bits: Number of "partial pre-image" (zero) bits in the hashed code.
date: The time that the message was sent, in the format .
resource: Resource data string being transmitted, e.g.
Official source
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