| Title | Exploiting Bitcoin Mining Pool for Stealthy and Flexible Botnet Channels |
| Publication Type | Conference Paper |
| Year of Publication | 2021 |
| Authors | Pan, Pengyu, Ma, Xiaobo, Bian, Huafeng |
| Conference Name | 2021 8th International Conference on Dependable Systems and Their Applications (DSA) |
| Keywords | bitcoin, bitcoin security, Botnet, command and control systems, Computer hacking, Human Behavior, information processing, Protocols, pubcrawl, Scalability, Servers |
| Abstract | Botnets are used by hackers to conduct cyber attacks and pose a huge threat to Internet users. The key of botnets is the command and control (C&C) channels. Security researchers can keep track of a botnet by capturing and analyzing the communication traffic between C&C servers and bots. Hence, the botmaster is constantly seeking more covert C&C channels to stealthily control the botnet. This paper designs a new botnet dubbed mp-botnet wherein bots communicate with each other based on the Stratum mining pool protocol. The mp-botnet botnet completes information transmission according to the communication method of the Stratum protocol. The communication traffic in the botnet is disguised as the traffic between the mining pool and the miners in a Bitcoin network, thereby achieving better stealthiness and flexibility. |
| DOI | 10.1109/DSA52907.2021.00111 |
| Citation Key | pan_exploiting_2021 |
Exploiting Bitcoin Mining Pool for Stealthy and Flexible Botnet Channels