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  4. Disappeared Coins: Steal Hashrate in Stratum Secretly

Disappeared Coins: Steal Hashrate in Stratum Secretly

Presented at Black Hat Asia 2021 Virtual, May 6, 2021, 10:20 a.m. (40 minutes).

<p><span style="font-size: 10pt;" data-mce-style="font-size: 10pt;">Most cryptocurrencies with high value are based on proof-of-work (PoW), including Bitcoin, Litecoin, and Ether. The process to "produce" them is usually called "mining", and the people involved are called "miners". The mining process is one of the most important infrastructures in the PoW based blockchain system. As the number of miners increases, mining becomes more and more difficult. Many miners decided to establish mining pools for cooperation so that miners who join the mining pools can share the profit according to the computing power they contributed to the pool. Stratum is the mainstream communication protocol between miners and mining pools. Its security is very important to the participants. In our work, we propose two novel man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack schemes towards Stratum, which means attackers can steal miners' computing power to any mining pool on the basis that TCP connections can be hijacked. Compared with existing attack schemes, our work is more secretive, more suitable for the real environment, and more harmful. The proof-of-concept (PoC) shows that our work works perfectly on most mining softwares and pools. Since the ISPs are hijacking traffic for advertisement all over the world, our work whistles to blockchain miners for a more hidden and profitable potential attack scheme.</span></p>

Presenters:

  • Xin Liu - Security Researcher , Lanzhou University
    Xin Liu is a security researcher at Lanzhou University and his research focuses on code audition, web security and blockchain security.
  • Rui Chong - Independent Researcher, &nbsp;
    Rui Chong is a security researcher. He has been focusing on web security, blockchain security and Red vs Blue.
  • Yuanyuan Huang - Security Researcher, Lanzhou University
    Yuanyuan Huang is a security researcher at Lanzhou University. She works on web security.
  • Yingli Zhang - Security Researcher, Lanzhou University
    Yingli Zhang is a security researcher at Lanzhou University. She works on network security.
  • Qingguo Zhou - Professor and PhD Supervisor, Lanzhou University
    Qingguo Zhou is a professor and PhD supervisor at Lanzhou University. He is mainly engaged in the research of embedded real-time operating systems, autonomous driving and safety-critical systems.

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