DUSTBot: A duplex and stealthy P2P-based botnet in the Bitcoin network.

ABSTRACT: As the root cause of illegal cyber activities, botnets are evolving continuously over the last two decades. Current researches on botnet command and control mechanism based on blockchain network suffer from high economic cost, single point of failure, and limited scalability. In this paper, we present DUSTBot, a novel P2P botnet model based on Bitcoin transactions to prepare for new cyber threats. Specifically, a covert, duplex, and low-cost command and control (C&C) channel in the Bitcoin network is presented in our work. DUSTBot uses the Bitcoin main network as the downstream channel while using the Bitcoin testnet as the upstream channel. Furthermore, the peer list exchange algorithm based on the Ethereum block hash proposed in this paper is effective against routing table poisoning att

SUBMITTER: Zhong Y 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6924649 | biostudies-literature | 2019

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature