Dissecting Android Cryptocurrency Miners

ACM Conference on Data and Application Security and Privacy (CODASPY), pp. 191–202

Abstract

Cryptojacking applications pose a serious threat to mobile devices. Due to the extensive computations, they deplete the battery fast and can even damage the device. In this work we make a step towards combating this threat. We collected and manually verified a large dataset of Android mining apps. In this paper, we analyze the gathered miners and identify how they work, what are the most popular libraries and APIs used to facilitate their development, and what static features are typical for this class of applications. Further, we analyzed our dataset using VirusTotal. The majority of our samples is considered malicious by at least one VirusTotal scanner, but 16 apps are not detected by any engine; and at least 5 apks were not seen previously by the service. Mining code could be obfuscated or fetched at runtime, and there are many confusing miner-related apps that actually do not mine. Thus, static features alone are not sufficient for miner detection. We have collected a feature set of dynamic metrics both for miners and unrelated benign apps, and built a machine learning-based tool for dynamic detection. Our BrenntDroid tool is able to detect miners with 95% of accuracy on our dataset.

Authors 5

1. Stanislav Dashevskyi

   University of Luxembourg

   Affiliation as printed

   Forescout Technologies & University of Luxembourg, Eindhoven, Netherlands

2. Yury Zhauniarovich
   Affiliation as printed

   Independent Researcher, Uzda, Byelarus

3. Olga Gadyatskaya Aachen

   Leiden University · University of Luxembourg

   Affiliation as printed

   LIACS, Leiden University & University of Luxembourg, Leiden, Netherlands

4. Aleksandr Pilgun

   University of Luxembourg

   Affiliation as printed

   SnT, University of Luxembourg, Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg

5. Hamza Ouhssain

   University of Luxembourg

   Affiliation as printed

   ARHS Developments & University of Luxembourg, Sanem, Luxembourg