Enterprise Security Assessment Framework for Cryptocurrency Mining Based on Monero

• Main Authors: M. S. Bissaliyev, A. T. Nyussupov, Sh. Zh. Mussiraliyeva
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Al-Farabi Kazakh National University 2018-08-01
• Series: Вестник КазНУ. Серия математика, механика, информатика
• Subjects: cryptocurrency mining; monero; hidden mining; cloud abuse
• Online Access: https://bm.kaznu.kz/index.php/kaznu/article/view/400/404

Mining a cryptocurrency is profitable on someone’s resources. It is becoming increasing problem in the enterprise to control the operations of its infrastructure while in idle or “off-work” time. In this paper we present enterprise security assessment framework for cryptocurrency mining based on Monero cryptocurrency. The framework consists from surveying power consumption on GPU mining farms and traditional desktop PCs, analysis of web resources for browser-based mining on both internal and external domain names, the handy network logs analysis tool based on the regular expressions. While there had been significant difference between GPU and traditional desktop PC’s power consumption, computational ratio of the idle PCs after working time remains questionable. In the browser-based cryptocurrency mining, there were no data on public domains, however there had been a possibility for using the private domain names, thus further research and different tools are required. In the network analysis, there were not enough evidences on the network mining, and this leads to the different research question that attackers may use proxy techniques to bypass traffic filtering and network analysis.