DAD-WEBCRYPTO: A DYNAMIC APPROACH FOR DETECTING WEB-BASED CRYPTOJACKING

ABSTRACT

With the recent interest in cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin, blockchain technology has become popular with its various applications. Unfortunately, oftentimes, hackers secretly extort victims’ resources, such as the Central Processing Unit (CPU), to mine cryptocurrencies through an attack called Cryptojacking. Specifically, browser-based cryptojacking has tremendous severity as it is perpetrated by visiting a website without any installation on the user’s PC. Most recent cryptojacking detection systems are signature-based and cannot detect emerging cryptomining codes. Thus, to overcome the limitations of signature-based approaches, this study develops a dynamic approach named DAD-WEBCRYPTO for detecting web-based cryptojacking. A browser extension is designed to verify if the target is affected by unknown cryptojacking attacks using cryptomining code pattern analysis and analysis engine design. The evaluation of DAD-WEBCRYPTO demonstrates that the approach outperforms other state-of-the-art findings in cryptojacking detection with an accuracy of 99.2%. These findings demonstrated that the approach could identify all types of browser-based cryptojacking.

Keywords: Cryptojacking, Dynamic Analysis, Cryptomining, MinerBlock WebSocket