Mitigation of Cryptojacking Attacks Using Taint Analysis

Cryptojacking (also called malicious cryptocurrency mining or cryptomining) is a new threat model using CPU resources covertly “mining” a cryptocurrency in the browser. The impact is a surge in CPU Usage and slows the system performance. In this research, in-browsercryptojacking mitigation has been built as an extension in Google Chrome using Taint analysis method. The method used in this research is attack modeling with abuse case using the Man-In-The-Middle (MITM) attack as a testing for mitigation. The proposed model is designed so that users will be notified if a cryptojacking attack occurs. Hence, the user is able to check the script characteristics that run on the website background. The results of this research show that the taint analysis is a promising method to mitigate cryptojacking attacks. From 100 random sample websites, the taint analysis method can detect 19 websites that are infcted by cryptojacking.