Master of Web Puppets: Abusing Web Browsers for Persistent and Stealthy Computation
Panagiotis Papadopoulos, Panagiotis Ilia, Michalis Polychronakis,, Evangelos P. Markatos, Sotiris Ioannidis, Giorgos Vasiliadis

TL;DR
This paper introduces MarioNet, a framework exploiting modern browser APIs to enable persistent, stealthy malicious computations like cryptocurrency mining and DDoS, even after the user closes the browser tab.
Contribution
The paper presents MarioNet, a novel browser-based botnet framework that leverages existing HTML5 APIs for persistent and stealthy malicious activities without additional software.
Findings
MarioNet can control browsers for malicious tasks.
It remains active after tab closure.
Compatible with all major browsers.
Abstract
The proliferation of web applications has essentially transformed modern browsers into small but powerful operating systems. Upon visiting a website, user devices run implicitly trusted script code, the execution of which is confined within the browser to prevent any interference with the user's system. Recent JavaScript APIs, however, provide advanced capabilities that not only enable feature-rich web applications, but also allow attackers to perform malicious operations despite the confined nature of JavaScript code execution. In this paper, we demonstrate the powerful capabilities that modern browser APIs provide to attackers by presenting MarioNet: a framework that allows a remote malicious entity to control a visitor's browser and abuse its resources for unwanted computation or harmful operations, such as cryptocurrency mining, password-cracking, and DDoS. MarioNet relies solely on…
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