Enterprise Security Assessment Framework for Cryptocurrency Mining Based on Monero

Abstract

Mining a cryptocurrency is profitable on someone’s resources. It is becoming increasing problem
in the enterprise to control the operations of its infrastructure while in idle or “off-work” time. In
this paper we present enterprise security assessment framework for cryptocurrency mining based
on Monero cryptocurrency. The framework consists from surveying power consumption on GPU
mining farms and traditional desktop PCs, analysis of web resources for browser-based mining
on both internal and external domain names, the handy network logs analysis tool based on the
regular expressions. While there had been significant difference between GPU and traditional
desktop PC’s power consumption, computational ratio of the idle PCs after working time remains
questionable. In the browser-based cryptocurrency mining, there were no data on public domains,
however there had been a possibility for using the private domain names, thus further research
and different tools are required. In the network analysis, there were not enough evidences on the
network mining, and this leads to the different research question that attackers may use proxy
techniques to bypass traffic filtering and network analysis.