Dissecting Android Cryptocurrency Miners

Dashevskyi, Stanislav; Zhauniarovich, Yury; Gadyatskaya, Olga; Pilgun, Aleksandr; Ouhssain, Hamza

doi:10.1145/3374664.3375724

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Dissecting Android Cryptocurrency Miners

Dashevskyi, Stanislav; Zhauniarovich, Yury; Gadyatskaya, Olga et al.

2020 • In CODASPY '20: Tenth ACM Conference on Data and Application Security and Privacy, New Orleans LA USA, March 2020

Peer reviewed

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https://hdl.handle.net/10993/45293

DOI
10.1145/3374664.3375724

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Keywords :

Android; cryptocurrency; mining

Abstract :

[en] Cryptojacking applications pose a serious threat to mobile devices. Due to the extensive computations, they deplete the battery fast and can even damage the device. In this work we make a step towards combating this threat. We collected and manually verified a large dataset of Android mining apps. In this paper, we analyze the gathered miners and identify how they work, what are the most popular libraries and APIs used to facilitate their development, and what static features are typical for this class of applications. Further, we analyzed our dataset using VirusTotal. The majority of our samples is considered malicious by at least one VirusTotal scanner, but 16 apps are not detected by any engine; and at least 5 apks were not seen previously by the service. Mining code could be obfuscated or fetched at runtime, and there are many confusing miner-related apps that actually do not mine. Thus, static features alone are not sufficient for miner detection.We have collected a feature set of dynamic metrics both for miners and unrelated benign apps, and built a machine learning-based tool for dynamic detection. Our BrenntDroid tool is able to detect miners with 95% of accuracy on our dataset.

Disciplines :

Computer science

Author, co-author :

Dashevskyi, Stanislav ; University of Luxembourg > Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SNT)

Zhauniarovich, Yury

Gadyatskaya, Olga ; University of Luxembourg > Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SNT)

Pilgun, Aleksandr ; University of Luxembourg > Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SNT) > PI Mauw

Ouhssain, Hamza ; University of Luxembourg > Faculty of Science, Technology and Communication (FSTC) > Computer Science and Communications Research Unit (CSC)

External co-authors :

yes

Language :

English

Title :

Dissecting Android Cryptocurrency Miners

Publication date :

March 2020

Event name :

Tenth ACM Conference on Data and Application Security and Privacy

Event date :

from 16-03-2020 to 18-03-2020

Audience :

International

Main work title :

CODASPY '20: Tenth ACM Conference on Data and Application Security and Privacy, New Orleans LA USA, March 2020

Publisher :

ACM, New York, United States - New York

ISBN/EAN :

978-1-4503-7107-0

Pages :

191–202

Peer reviewed :

Peer reviewed

Focus Area :

Security, Reliability and Trust

Additional URL :

https://standash.github.io/android-miners-dataset/

FnR Project :

FNR11289380 - Systematically Exploring Semantic App Models For Android, 2016 (15/11/2016-14/11/2020) - Aleksandr Pilgun

Name of the research project :

Combatting Context-Sensitive Mobile Malware C15/IS/10404933/COMMA

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