Distributed Denial of Service!?

Any service can be attacked by a Denial of Service, especially if distributed, yet only in the case of IRC the entire network is damaged by attacking one of its hubs.

Both Jabber and PSYC draw some strength from being architectured unlike IRC. Jabber however has developed a tendency to large size servers which, if attacked, would still disrupt large amounts of communications.

On PSYC this isn't different currently, but we plan to provide strategies that encourage the implementation of decentralized communities even for large deployments, so that an attack would only affect a small portion of the general network, not the service in large scale.

fippo asks, how is that of any help, if instead of attacking one large server the attacker does the same on a hundred smaller servers?

Well, attacking several servers probably takes more time which additionally raises your chances of getting traced and caught by whatever type of police would be in charge. Maybe the latter is unlikely these days of wild west internet, not sure.

And fippo adds, maybe a large server is even better to defend, since you are more likely to be able to afford an employee of your service provider to monitor your internet traffic day and night, then act on time and try to filter the attack from the regular traffic reaching your server.

A company or organization can still employ somebody to monitor their servers.. even if it is a large decentralized deployment. So having a single large server is still strategically less favorable.

And why would an attacker be motivated to attack the entire network? Isn't he normally focused on a particular conference or person?

In the normal case where the interest lies in disrupting the service for a group of people (who rejected the attacker from entering a group, for instance), in IRC this still means to cause a netsplit, which is a major disruption of the entire service. In the case of a large popular conference server on Jabber this means that many groups of people would be affected, whereas on PSYC only those groups are affected, which reside on that particular server, which is intentionally small.

<coyo> indeed, it only effects a small group of people, rather than entire networks of possibly thousands upon thousands of people. it localizes the damage, and makes it far less rewarding.

P.S. All of this affects centralistic systems even more than any networked system. It's just a question of time until a serious attack is heading their way.