Be prepared for Sybil attacks on governance #27

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2026-10-22T14:31:17Z

ntnsndr commented

2026-10-22 14:31:17 +00:00

What's the idea?

As this post suggests, our cooperative governance is potentially vulnerable to Sybil attacks; this means that a single actor (such as a person or organization) could generate a large number of coordinated members (such as bots or coerced people) to steer governance power away from non-coerced people.

So far we have been a high-trust community, and that has worked just fine. But we should at least account for the possibility that, especially if our purchasing power becomes more significant, such an attack is possible. This could be done with a some simple provisions in our governance documents, perhaps aided by some supporting technical infrastructure.

At the same time, this can be quite difficult to enforce, considering that there are many legitimate forms of coordination (political parties, unions), and illegitimate forms (bot armies) may be hard to detect or prove.

Why does it matter?

This is a cooperative for its members, and a Sybil attack is an attack on their rights.

How might it work?

I'm not sure exactly how best to address this. Some potential options:

State that all members must be represented by one human (even if they are organizational members), and clarify process for removal
Explicitly empower some roles in the co-op to halt a governance process that involves suspicion of such an attack
Monitor IP addresses to identify cases of multiple members working from the same machine or location

What else?

## What's the idea? As [this post suggests](https://social.coop/@SomeAnoTooter@mastodon.online/117482557187856103), our cooperative governance is potentially vulnerable to Sybil attacks; this means that a single actor (such as a person or organization) could generate a large number of coordinated members (such as bots or coerced people) to steer governance power away from non-coerced people. So far we have been a high-trust community, and that has worked just fine. But we should at least account for the possibility that, especially if our purchasing power becomes more significant, such an attack is possible. This could be done with a some simple provisions in our governance documents, perhaps aided by some supporting technical infrastructure. At the same time, this can be quite difficult to enforce, considering that there are many legitimate forms of coordination (political parties, unions), and illegitimate forms (bot armies) may be hard to detect or prove. ## Why does it matter? This is a cooperative for its members, and a Sybil attack is an attack on their rights. ## How might it work? I'm not sure exactly how best to address this. Some potential options: * State that all members must be represented by one human (even if they are organizational members), and clarify process for removal * Explicitly empower some roles in the co-op to halt a governance process that involves suspicion of such an attack * Monitor IP addresses to identify cases of multiple members working from the same machine or location What else?

👀 1

jbwexler commented

2026-10-24 18:51:15 +00:00

I wonder if Open Collective would be able to confirm whether suspicious users paid with the same or related credit cards? I would think getting dozens of credit cards would be at least slightly harder than getting an equal amount of IP addresses. Still, I'm not sure how you detect a sophisticated attack with all unique credit cards and IP addresses. Unless we went some sort of biometric or gov ID route, which I don't think we want...

solo.ist referenced this issue

2026-10-26 06:31:40 +00:00

Institutional membership: a policy draft (resolves the open question; needs a Terms §4 carve-out) #32

inference-admin added the Governance label 2026-11-09 16:24:40 +00:00

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Reference: co-op/support#27