Abstract
With the rising popularity of cryptocurrencies and the increasing value of the whole industry, people are incentivized to join and earn revenues by cryptomining—using computational resources for cryptocurrency transaction verification. Nevertheless, there is an increasing number of abusive cryptomining cases, and it is reported that “coin miner malware” grew by more than 4000% in 2018. In this work, we analyzed the cryptominer network communication and proposed the DeCrypto system that can detect and report mining on high-speed 100 Gbps backbone Internet lines with millions of users. The detector uses the concept of heterogeneous weak-indication detectors (Machine-Learning-based, domain-based, and payload-based) that work together and create a robust and accurate detector with an extremely low false-positive rate. The detector was implemented and evaluated on a real nationwide high-speed network and proved efficient in a real-world deployment.
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Notes
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Longer TCP connections are split into multiple flows.
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Acknowledgments
This research was funded by the Ministry of Interior of the Czech Republic, grant No. VJ02010024: Flow-Based Encrypted Traffic Analysis and also by the Grant Agency of the CTU in Prague, grant No. SGS20/210/OHK3/3T/18 funded by the MEYS of the Czech Republic.
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Plný, R., Hynek, K., Čejka, T. (2022). DeCrypto: Finding Cryptocurrency Miners on ISP Networks. In: Reiser, H.P., Kyas, M. (eds) Secure IT Systems. NordSec 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13700. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22295-5_8
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