Miners in the Cloud: Measuring and Analyzing Cryptocurrency Mining in Public Clouds

TL;DR

This study analyzes the relationship between cryptocurrency mining pools and public cloud providers using passive DNS data, revealing significant associations, security risks, and a shift towards mining Metaverse currencies.

Contribution

It provides the first large-scale analysis of mining pool associations with public clouds, highlighting security risks and the evolving landscape of cryptocurrency mining.

Findings

24 cloud providers associated with mining pools, with Amazon and Google accounting for 48%

Heavy-tailed distribution indicating preferential attachment in associations

Approximately 30-35% of cloud endpoints linked to malicious activities

Abstract

Cryptocurrencies, arguably the most prominent application of blockchains, have been on the rise with a wide mainstream acceptance. A central concept in cryptocurrencies is "mining pools", groups of cooperating cryptocurrency miners who agree to share block rewards in proportion to their contributed mining power. Despite many promised benefits of cryptocurrencies, they are equally utilized for malicious activities; e.g., ransomware payments, stealthy command, control, etc. Thus, understanding the interplay between cryptocurrencies, particularly the mining pools, and other essential infrastructure for profiling and modeling is important. In this paper, we study the interplay between mining pools and public clouds by analyzing their communication association through passive domain name system (pDNS) traces. We observe that 24 cloud providers have some association with mining pools as observed from the pDNS query traces, where popular public cloud providers, namely Amazon and Google, have almost 48% of such an association. Moreover, we found that the cloud provider presence and cloud provider-to-mining pool association both exhibit a heavy-tailed distribution, emphasizing an intrinsic preferential attachment model with both mining pools and cloud providers. We measure the security risk and exposure of the cloud providers, as that might aid in understanding the intent of the mining: among the top two cloud providers, we found almost 35% and 30% of their associated endpoints are positively detected to be associated with malicious activities, per the virustotal.com scan. Finally, we found that the mining pools presented in our dataset are predominantly used for mining Metaverse currencies, highlighting a shift in cryptocurrency use, and demonstrating the prevalence of mining using public clouds.