Crypto-Hotwire: Illegal Blockchain Mining at Zero Cost Using Public Infrastructures

01/04/2021
by   Felipe Ribas Coutinho, et al.
0

Blockchains and cryptocurrencies disrupted the conversion of energy into a medium of exchange. Numerous applications for blockchains and cryptocurrencies are now envisioned for purposes ranging from inventory control to banking applications. Naturally, in order to mine in an economically viable way, regions where energy is plentiful and cheap, e.g., close to hydroelectric plants, are sought. The possibility of converting energy into cash, however, also opens up opportunities for a new kind of cyber attack aimed at illegally mining cryptocurrencies by stealing energy. In this work, we indicate, using data from January and February of 2018 from our university, that such a threat is real, and present a projection of the gains derived from these attacks.

READ FULL TEXT

page 1

page 2

page 3

page 4

research
12/16/2019

BDoS: Blockchain Denial of Service

Proof-of-work (PoW) cryptocurrency blockchains like Bitcoin secure vast ...
research
11/25/2018

Countering Selfish Mining in Blockchains

Selfish mining is a well known vulnerability in blockchains exploited by...
research
05/14/2018

Double-Spending Risk Quantification in Private, Consortium and Public Ethereum Blockchains

Recently, several works conjectured the vulnerabilities of mainstream bl...
research
06/30/2021

Towards Verifiable Mutability for Blockchains

Due to their immutable log of information, blockchains can be considered...
research
02/25/2020

Double-Spend Counterattacks: Threat of Retaliation in Proof-of-Work Systems

Proof-of-Work mining is intended to provide blockchains with robustness ...
research
06/27/2021

Capacity Analysis of Public Blockchain

As distributed ledgers, blockchains run consensus protocols which trade ...

Please sign up or login with your details

Forgot password? Click here to reset