Digging into Browser-based Crypto Mining
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Mining is the foundation of blockchain-based cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin rewarding the miner for finding blocks for new transactions. Monero, a recent alternative currency enables mining with standard hardware in contrast to special hardware (ASICs) as often used in Bitcoin, paving the way for browser-based mining as a new revenue model for website operators. In this work, we study the prevalence of this new phenomenon. We identify and classify mining websites on a large corpus of websites and present a new fingerprinting method which finds up to a factor of 5.7 more miners than publicly available block lists. Our work identifies and dissects Coinhive as the major browser-mining stakeholder. Further, we present a new method to associate mined blocks in the Monero blockchain to mining pools and uncover that Coinhive currently contributes 1.18 quarter of a million USD per month.
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