Detecting Cryptomining Traffic in IoT Networks

With the proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) devices in smart home environments, the threat landscape has expanded to include cryptojacking attacks, which exploit computational resources for unauthorized cryptocurrency mining. In response to these challenges, this paper extends the security capability of the IoT Proxy--a recently proposed solution to enhance the security of resource-constrained IoT devices--allowing users to take advantage of its security functionalities also in smart home environments. By integrating a new machine learning-based cryptojacking detection module, this enhanced version of the IoT Proxy can identify these emerging threats, safeguarding both the integrity and performance of all the devices in the smart home network. The IoT Proxy serves a dual purpose by providing security functionalities for resource-constrained IoT devices and offering additional layers of defense for less constrained devices, thereby ensuring comprehensive protection across the smart home ecosystem. The conducted experiments demonstrate the efficacy of the approach without relying on Deep Packet Inspection (DPI), thus preserving user privacy and making it applicable even to encrypted traffic--a prevailing characteristic of contemporary network communication.