Preventing Mass Sybil Attacks? Read an article to understand the Optimism identity layer AttestationStation
Author: LeftOfCenter
Author: LeftOfCenter
One of the most common criticisms of Web2 is that users have no ownership over the network or platform they contribute to. Web3 provides an alternative, community-based ownership model, and tokens are a key part of this new paradigm.
However, in a decentralized context, it is difficult to define which wallet accounts are active users, but what is certain is that there are a large number of airdrop hunter wallets, and these wallets have no other interaction except participating in airdrop-related operations For the record, this is what we call a Sybil attack.
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Sybil Attacks and Drop Hunters
Sybil Attack refers to the act of creating multiple different false identities for manipulation in a network system, which will allow a small number of participants in the network to gain influence quotas that do not belong to them. PoS and proof-of-work mechanisms on the blockchain provide a Sybil-resistant solution that prevents a single user from launching a large number of nodes to affect the network due to the economic cost.
At this stage, airdrop hunters have become a new form of sybil attack. These accounts interact with smart contracts and protocols purposefully to obtain a large amount of airdrop Token shares.
Creating a new identity in Web3 is as simple as generating a private key, and requires only a small gas fee by sending funds to multiple different wallets, making the cost for airdrop hunters almost zero. Sybil attacks will become more violent as transaction fees decrease.
The existence of a large number of airdrop hunters has forced many decentralized applications to face the problem that the simple design of the airdrop mechanism may not work. If a large number of Tokens are allocated to airdrop hunting robots without screening, many users will lose their rewards after receiving rewards. Cash out immediately and let the price of Token plummet in a short period of time.
In the case where it is not feasible to measure the real needs of the project with a single wallet address, for the project side, it is necessary to exclude at least how likely one address is a robot, so that these addresses can be excluded from the whitelist.
This requires a new decentralized KYC method to prove your true identity without sacrificing privacy and decentralization, that is, the proof of "you are you", which is what AttestationStation wants to achieve.
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What is AttestationStation?
AttestationStation is a permission-free reputation smart contract deployed on Optimism, which allows users to generate an attestation for any address on the chain, which is called an attestation in this system, and multiple Attestations constitute the social relationship graph of addresses on the chain .
So, what is attestation?
Attestation is actually an arbitrary comment on anything. For example, "his name is Robert Paulson" is a common type of attestation in daily life, which can prove someone's identity. When we log into an email account, we must enter a password for attestation, proving our digital identity.
In the blockchain, the corresponding proof method is the private key. For example, when you sign a transaction, you sign with the private key to prove that you are the owner of the assets in the wallet. Looking at a user's on-chain transaction records, it can be found that, in essence, this type of operation is to initiate a corresponding proof for a smart contract.
In the AttestationStation system, an attestation can be a "trust score" for a specific address, or any "qualitative" or quantitative statement. For example, a person participated in governance, made a donation, participated in an offline meeting, and was proved by a friend's social relationship with Attestation, etc., can all be used as a declaration method.
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characteristic
AttestationStation is a decentralized, point-to-point, multi-source, and modular on-chain relationship map. With the accumulation of more and more data, samples, and iterative algorithms, it can conduct qualitative analysis on user addresses, based on different The algorithm extracts a more accurate user portrait.
Decentralized identity trust network without revealing privacy
AttestationStation is built with zero-knowledge proof, which allows users to prove the authenticity of one thing without providing their full identity, which means that "you are you" can be proved without revealing privacy, which is encrypted The cornerstone of the industry, this is of course an inevitable choice.
AttestationStation is not user data and identity owned by a single entity, but a peer-to-peer network in which nodes of the network authenticate each other.
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Each Attestation is a proof that an address on the chain signs another address on the chain, and each signing will generate a new connection in the network (technically speaking, a directed graph), which constitutes an anonymous node. Mutual verification, point-to-point social network, such as zain.eth initiates an attest to prove that "kathy.eth is his colleague", and kathy.eth initiates an attest to prove that "will.eth is his friend"...
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Decentralized identity graph requires different proof of participation of participants
The traditional verification method is a single source of information, such as a video call or an email, which is easy to forge. AttestationStation uses multi-point source interactive verification. The digital identity of a person composed of multiple sources is more secure and more difficult to forge. big.
Quantitative and Qualitative Analysis
Through the above multi-point source data maps from different dimensions, it is possible to show the relationship between a person and the world, including the activities a person has participated in in the past, friends and neighbors, work experience, experience, skills, and hackathons he has participated in, etc. Activities, through quantitative and qualitative analysis of the data of these relationships, a corresponding trust score value can be generated for each wallet address.
For a specific wallet address, once there are multiple proofs of social relationships from different dimensions based on the address (this proof is not only the transaction, but also the activities he has participated in, the metaverse footprint, the NFT in his collection, the community he participated in) and activities in the community, participating in online governance, etc.), then developers can extract more information based on different algorithms, and perform finer-grained user portrait analysis on the address, not just It is the basic judgment of "screening whether an address is a robot account" we mentioned above.
Whether it is screening loyal users for airdrops, obtaining real market demand data, or even community players looking for specific vibe attributes, all projects with different application needs can benefit a lot by extracting data insights from this data map.
Modular Relationship Graph
AttestationStation has adopted a peer-to-peer approach from the beginning to create a decentralized, permissionless open identity data graph. Therefore, all Attestations submitted by users are proofs on the chain and can be called by various smart contracts in different applications.
The modular AttestationStation allows its data sets to be arbitrarily combined, extracted and reused, iterated and recombined based on actual effects. As the algorithm continues to evolve, a larger trust network can be derived to establish a completely peer-to-peer trusted neutral reputation system. It is worth noting that as the trust network accumulates network effects, Sybil attacks will become more and more difficult, which means that the cost of anti-Sybil will become lower and lower.
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AttestationStation and Citizen House
The birth of AttestationStation stems from Optimism's direct demand for decentralized governance, that is, it hopes to incorporate a wide range of communities and groups into Optimism public affairs governance, so that OP Token holders are eligible to participate in "What is public opinion on Optimism?" business-friendly" governance and dialogue.
Optimism believes that if the public governance right is simply and roughly equated with Token ownership, the final result is that those who hold the most Tokens become the ones who occupy the absolute right to speak and govern, and their decisions cannot represent the will of the public, eventually leading to plutocratic politics (plutocratic).
To curb this plutocracy, Optimism formed the public organization Optimism Collective, which includes OP Holders and OP Citizens' House. For "OP Holders", mainly adopt the proxy voting model of "one currency one vote" or entrust voting rights to others. Token voting represents the preference of capital, while the other part It is mainly responsible for voting on RetroPGF, following the voting principle of "one person, one vote".
It is worth mentioning that this retrospective public product financing plan called RetroPGF launched by Optimism will become a testing ground for its concept of "impact = profit". The idea is that individuals who positively impact collective organizations should be rewarded with profits so that the collective as a whole can benefit from it, creating an economically circular and diverse ecosystem.
According to the plan, RetroPGF will carry out multiple rounds of retrospective financing allocation plans in the future, and allocate funds in RetroPGF to project parties that create public products in the Optimism ecosystem. Optimism allocated 20% of the initial supply of OP to RetroPGF, and other sources of income include part of the profits generated by redeploying the Optimism protocol, and donations from other project parties."How to allocate these funds and how much to allocate becomes the top priority", which will be decided by the members of Citizens' House. At present, the first round of RetroPGF has voted for 58 Open source software project allocates $1 million in funding, the second round of RetroPGF
Currently in progress, RetroPGF 2 will allocate 10 million OP tokens to fund public products that support OP Stack development and related use cases.
Another important part of Optimism Collective, "OP holders", can veto changes to the founding documents of the Optimism Foundation. Optimism believes that this structural governance system can achieve a balance between short-term incentives and long-term vision The goal.
However, in the blockchain, this "one person, one vote" mechanism is also easy to fake. After all, there is no cost to create a new wallet as an identity, which requires a decentralized identity system.
The goal of AttestationStation is to create a strong reputation system, which will become the key to eliminating plutocratic politics on the chain and maximizing the reflection of human public interests. Just as a token-based governance system (one coin, one vote) reflects the preferences of token holders, a reputation-based governance system represents the voice of individual citizens (one person, one vote).
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What problem does it solve?
In the short term, AttestationStation can be used as an identity primitive to solve the biggest problem in the encryption industry-large-scale Sybil attacks. By filtering out robot addresses, the most direct role of AttestationStation is to help project parties identify real users. A simple use case is to use an open, license-free anti-Sybil attack API to eliminate Sybil accounts. Further, more effective indicators can be obtained to measure real user needs, conversion rates of airdrops, etc.
The problem of fake identities does not only occur in the encryption industry. The Internet is also full of a large number of fake accounts, which affect billions of people. Such accounts not only spread fake news, but even affect the direction of political public opinion, such as the presidential election. Robots are used to intervene in the direction of public opinion.
Of course, a reputation system with sufficient diversity and data should not only be about transactions, but should involve a wider range of information on the chain as a person, including the activities he has participated in, where he has been, and which communities he has participated in. Activities, which NFTs are held, governance participation and activity, etc., these data can be used for qualitative analysis to obtain in-depth, multi-dimensional user interest/vibe map insights, etc.
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Hackathons and data
Of course, whether the above applications can be effective depends entirely on whether sufficient verification data can be accumulated in the data graph library in the future, how these data are used and practiced by developers, and what actual effects are finally produced in actual cases.
Therefore, it is very important to introduce enough developers or project parties for the agreement. Currently, the following are created on the agreement:The identity oracle Clique is currently based on the protocolDeveloped a privacy-preserving identity verification application based on zero-knowledge proof
Flipsidecrypto, an app that allows users to use zk on OP's Discord to prove their user group identity without revealing their Discord ID.Initiate an on-chain score based on AttestationStationGitcoin Passport, Guild, nxyz, Otterspace, Trust Protocol, and Wonderverse, in addition, AttestationStation will be with
Wait for the team to work together to build an ecosystem based on this reputation.Officially launched by OptimismCustom Image NFT Items
Also developed based on AttestationStation.At the ETHDenver 2023 Hackathon,Build applications based on AttestationStation
It is the only theme of this hackathon, which is enough to see that Optimism attaches great importance to Attestation's developer ecology.
On the other hand, in order to create an identity map with rich data sources, data verification input from a large number of users is required. How to motivate ordinary users to join attest is a crucial issue. One possible option is the third round of Optimism airdrop incentives It will interact with AttestationStation eco-related applications.dashboardCreated from @oplabspbc
, so far 540,000 certificates have been generated on AttestationStation, provided by 513 users, which shows that a single address has a high degree of activity.
According to the leaderboard, Clique has produced the most proof data so far, with a total of 69,000 addresses, accounting for more than 60%. Most of the proof data are operated around Twitter and Discord.Sybil attacks and anti-sybil solutions are destined to be a game of wits and courage. To prevent bot abuse,Arbitrum Conducts Initial Sybil Address Hunting
, Optimism removed 17,000 addresses of suspected Sybil attackers.
As more and more project parties realize that the simple airdrop mechanism is not good for project growth, the simple and crude airdrop distribution mechanism will gradually be eliminated and replaced by a new generation of airdrop incentive strategies that present multiple rounds and quests. It is foreseeable Interestingly, future airdrops will not only be about quantitative data such as transaction volume, but also qualitative data analysis, such as hierarchical screening of users based on community contribution value, and even more targeted users from the interest/vibe map. Accurate user portrait analysis, this kind of data analysis is conducive to the display of group wisdom under the blessing of modularization and algorithms.
Creating a trustless identity system in the encryption system is a crucial part whether it is applied to DeFi lending or promoting the evolution of the encryption industry to long-termism and organic growth. Today we see different solutions coming out. Whether it is Soul Binding or DID is to solve this problem, but no matter how well the mechanism is designed or how ambitious the vision is, it is not the key to success, but whether it can attract enough users to join and contribute data. Optimism, which is known for its game incentive mechanism and aims to create a sustainable future for Ethereum, will be the key to this game in the upcoming third round of airdrops, whether it will link AttestationStation data contributions with airdrop tasks, and how to set relevant weights. On the other side, the "airdrop hunter" needs to think about it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0N1Z9AyrEM
https://dev.optimism.io/making-blockchains-human-friendly/
https://community.optimism.io/docs/governance/citizens-house/#how-retropgf-works
https://community.optimism.io/docs/governance/attestation-station/#
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