Crypto-Mining Application Fingerprinting Method

Computing power has increased exponentially in the last decades, and more and more consumer devices are now permanently connected to the internet, to form the so called “Internet of Things” (IoT), Following this trend, security threats and vulnerabilities have increased drastically over a short period of time, as more and more devices are inter-connected and not properly secured. Lately, the growing popularity of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are generating a lot of hype and concern, among security specialists, as unwanted mining applications on an end-user device can potentially pose both security risks and increased operating costs. There are multiple ways of detecting unwanted applications at the user-level, by means of URL blocking and application fingerprinting, and this paper will cover a detection method proposed by our group.