Digging into Browser-based Crypto Mining
arXiv:1808.00811 · doi:10.1145/3278532.3278539
Abstract
Mining is the foundation of blockchain-based cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin rewarding the miner for finding blocks for new transactions. The Monero currency enables mining with standard hardware in contrast to special hardware (ASICs) as often used in Bitcoin, paving the way for in-browser mining as a new revenue model for website operators. In this work, we study the prevalence of this new phenomenon. We identify and classify mining websites in 138M domains and present a new fingerprinting method which finds up to a factor of 5.7 more miners than publicly available block lists. Our work identifies and dissects Coinhive as the major browser-mining stakeholder. Further, we present a new method to associate mined blocks in the Monero blockchain to mining pools and uncover that Coinhive currently contributes 1.18% of mined blocks having turned over 1293 Moneros in June 2018.
IMC '18: Internet Measurement Conference
Cited by in corpus (12)
- Cryptomining Makes Noise: a Machine Learning Approach for Cryptojacking Detection
- Beyond the Front Page: Measuring Third Party Dynamics in the Field
- All that Glitters is not Bitcoin -- Unveiling the Centralized Nature of the BTC (IP) Network
- End-to-End Analysis of In-Browser Cryptojacking
- Dissecting Android Cryptocurrency Miners
- A First Look at the Crypto-Mining Malware Ecosystem: A Decade of Unrestricted Wealth
- Does It Spin? On the Adoption and Use of QUIC's Spin Bit
- WebAssembly and Security: a review
- A Retrospective Analysis of User Exposure to (Illicit) Cryptocurrency Mining on the Web
- EdgePoW: Adaptive Ingress-Aware Defense with Non-Interactive PoW Against Volumetric SYN Floods
- Web-based volunteer distributed computing for handling time-critical urgent workloads
- Fuzzm: Finding Memory Bugs through Binary-Only Instrumentation and Fuzzing of WebAssembly