Jan Rüth

Constantin Sander, Jan Rüth, Oliver Hohlfeld et al.

Transport protocols use congestion control to avoid overloading a network. Nowadays, different congestion control variants exist that influence performance. Studying their use is thus relevant, but it is hard to identify which variant is used. While passive identification approaches exist, these require detailed domain knowledge and often also rely on outdated assumptions about how congestion control operates and what data is accessible. We present DeePCCI, a passive, deep learning-based congestion control identification approach which does not need any domain knowledge other than training traffic of a congestion control variant. By only using packet arrival data, it is also directly applicable to encrypted (transport header) traffic. DeePCCI is therefore more easily extendable and can also be used with QUIC.

Jan Rüth, Torsten Zimmermann, Konrad Wolsing et al.

Mining is the foundation of blockchain-based cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin rewarding the miner for finding blocks for new transactions. The Monero currency enables mining with standard hardware in contrast to special hardware (ASICs) as often used in Bitcoin, paving the way for in-browser 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 in 138M domains 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% of mined blocks having turned over 1293 Moneros in June 2018.