Feasibility of IoT botnet for cryptocurrency mining

Abstract

In recent years, Internet-of-Things (IoT) has been rising in trend, converting all traditional appliance into smart connected appliance. The amount of IoT devices present not only in household, but also offices and in public are increasingly fast. As for software, blockchain technology is also on the rise, with the innovative decentralized cryptocurrency that derives from such technology, has a value in the market. Users could earn cryptocurrency by using their hardware to perform cryptocurrency mining but to stay in the competition against people with better resources requires more money. In view of the increasing number of IoT devices being used, it could tempt users to utilize the IoT devices that are not owned by them to perform the mining on behalf, this is known as cryptojacking. In this report, we experiment on the feasibility of implementing cryptocurrency mining software on an embedded system in IoT devices and to form a botnet to perform cryptocurrency mining. We also respond to the feasibility with countermeasures by measuring the overhead imposed on the devices such as resource utilization on CPU and memory usage as well as the network traffic.