Carleton University - School of Computer Science Honours Project
Fall 2020
Browser Based Cryptojacking Detection Systems
Mohamad Cheaito
SCS Honours Project Image
ABSTRACT
When monetary value is added to any piece of technology, adversaries are always added to the picture. The most known technology that is directly related to money is crypto currencies. Crypto currency mining started with Bitcoin and the Bitcoin blockchain. The use of low power personal computers was enough to mine crypto at the beginning but as time went on, there was much more competition as to who would be able to mine crypto currencies quicker. This resulted in adversaries starting to use technologies to use user’s CPUs processing power to complete mining functionalities. One of these technologies is the use of in browser crypto mining JavaScript scripts. These scripts can be injected into the HTML code of a website to allow website owners to use website visitor’s CPU to crypto mine for themselves. All this functionality can be done without the permission of the website visitors. This is called browser-based cryptojacking. The goal of this project is to understand the ways adversaries conduct cryptojacking activities and find a way to detect crypto jacking websites. This will be completed by building upon a crypto-jacking detection system called OUTGUARD to allow for more crypto mining websites to be detected.