Apps with millions of Google Play downloads covertly mine cryptocurrency

http://arstechnica.com/security/2014/03/apps-with-millions-of-google-play-downloads-covertly-mine-cryptocurrency/

by OWaz • 12 years ago

137 89 12 years ago

arstechnica.com

diminoten• 12 years ago

the purveyor of the apps subsequently earned thousands of Dogecoins

So like 5 bucks?

changdizzle• 12 years ago

This is alarmingly similar to the ESEA situation where ESEA (a premium membership gaming community) discreetly built a bitcoin miner into their anti-cheat client [1], fried some users' graphics cards and were found out then fined $1MM. [2]

[1] http://www.theverge.com/2013/5/2/4292672/esea-gaming-network... [2] http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/11/e-sports/

devindotcom2• 12 years ago

This is pretty hilarious. Given how small the load can be to automatically contribute hashes to a pool for ___coin, I expect more of these in the future, but smarter. Runs for 5 seconds per minute on ten million devices for six months? That's no joke with some of the hardware out there.

It's this close to a victimless crime (that is, unless the victim gets their CPU/GPU fried, as has happened with these nets before). But what about apps that use spare cycles while you're plugged in, or above 75% battery, or between hours x and y, to mine dogecoins for charity? People would voluntarily submit to that!

wyager2• 12 years ago

It's still stupid. Mobile devices are orders of magnitudes worse than PCs at the integer arithmetic required for cryptocurrency mining.

gargarplex2• 12 years ago

only a brewing threat til it becomes a force. innovator's dilemma.

devindotcom2• 12 years ago

But you have orders of magnitude more of them. Slaved mobile devices are orders of magnitude cheaper, too!

doesnt_know• 12 years ago

Electricity and bandwidth are both resources that most people have to pay for, I would consider this theft and not a "victimless crime".

The severity of financial impact on the victim is irrelevant. If I steal tiny amounts of money ~0.01c from large amounts of people and accrued significant wealth from it, is it fine? Is it a "victimless crime" because the amount is so small?

negrit• 12 years ago

The severity of financial impact on the victim is irrelevant.

Not if it actually damage some parts of the phone like the battery because you have to charge it more often.

rplnt2• 12 years ago

A theft? Do you consider all installed apps to be stealing then?

UweSchmidt• 12 years ago

It's the disdain for the user. Take their data, use their CPUs, whatever. Users are dumb, they won't notice, and hey, the app's free anyway.

Back in the day, the software on my "Personal Computer" was my friend. It was all wonderful things to have and to learn about.

Looking at my smartphone that's right here on my table, it's shiny, but I've long felt a distinct lack of control over the thing. And now this: Hello - any of you apps mining anything right now in there?

clef3• 12 years ago

I Just use the factory apps and have nothing else installed, this way no one mines anything out of me.

untog• 12 years ago

"Personal Computers" have had viruses and malware for decades. They are most assuredly not full of "all wonderful things".

yen223• 12 years ago

"Users are dumb, they won't notice, and hey, the app's free anyway."

Maybe we've stumbled on a great alternative to the freemium model?

DanBC2• 12 years ago

Here's a story from 2004 about a school IT tech who installed SETI@home on the school machines. The increased electricity bill caused some consternation and he lost his job.

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20041010/2225204.shtml

I imagine that mining crypto currency without permission is due for a high profile court case.

mikeash• 12 years ago

I did that on some university servers around 1999. We had a few Alphas dedicated to batch processing, and I set up S@H to run on them.

One catch was that the duration of batch jobs was limited to 12 hours, so I couldn't just fire and forget. I ended up scripting it so that when the job ended, it automatically resubmitted itself to the batch queue.

It took about a day before I got a surprisingly friendly e-mail from the sysadmin asking me to please stop.

Cthulhu_• 12 years ago

I'm inclined to believe that things like this could just be an alternative to ads. Ads take up CPU, battery life and bandwidth too (although a relatively small amount compared to coin mining). Alternative income source, I guess.

jlcummings2• 12 years ago

Taking that further, I would much rather be used as a fractional miner than provide unhindered, across the board access to personal transportable data and per device usage from the device.

Providing a user with means to throttle or govern the mining seems appropriate even if not explicit. If I am trying to use my device put the virtual mining crew on break and dont check back for at least 20 minutes.

Secondly, exclusive mining rights. Only one app per device, but each developer can ask for a share of the haul. Having more mining apps competing for time will work in no ones favor. As the device owner I should inherently be entitled to a significant share.

An auditible mining client would be valuable. I could certainly see this as something that could eventually fit neatly somewhere between an optional and encouraged part of an AOSP deployment.

DigitalSea• 12 years ago

I think what surprises me most about this situation is that even though the supposed offending apps, Songs in particular has been downloaded and installed between one and five million times but only possibly generated the author a few thousand Dogecoin. Seems like a big risk for a few dollars, wouldn't advertisements be more profitable option?

scott_karana2• 12 years ago

Doesn't the app have ads in addition to the mining aspect?

As someone pointed out in a similar past thread, 1 coin for $0 of energy is still an infinite profit.

MichaelGG2• 12 years ago

That's putting a value of zero on being fined (or worse). I don't think the risk is non-zero. Just takes one zealous AG to file a case against you (even if you're out of jurisdiction, there's a non-zero chance you might end up passing through at some point).

incomethax2• 12 years ago

This could be an interesting model to do out in the open. Rather than covertly mine cryptocurrency, say that the app is free if you contribute hashes to a pool, or you can buy the premium version that doesn't.

Almost like the "slow" version vs the "fast" version of an app.

yuhong• 12 years ago

Or just mention it in the description and make it low priority using nice (in addition to doing it when plugged in).

clef3• 12 years ago

Didn't this idea start with SETI@home in the 90's ?

incomethax2• 12 years ago

The idea of sharing computation cycles certainly did, however, converting those computation cycles into currency so it can fuel other "real" work is most definitely a by-product of bitcoin.

Houshalter• 12 years ago

The economics make no sense. It costs more in electricity to run the program than to just pay for it directly. It's a trivially small amount.

lazylizard• 12 years ago

for all that trouble why don't they(makers of these apps) just buy a pc with a pair of reasonable ati cards?

DanBC2• 12 years ago

Because they don't pay the energy costs on other people's phones.

kevingadd2• 12 years ago

For a F2P app, the cost of doing this is basically 0 and the revenue will continue to increase as long as the app keeps getting popular. Doesn't matter if the revenue is small, it's still more revenue from your F2P app.

MichaelGG2• 12 years ago

Certainly some jurisdiction might decide this isn't "fair" and attempt prosecution? May be worth a headline somplace near election time.

herf• 12 years ago

These schemes mostly just convert electricity to cryptocurrency. The electricity is almost always more expensive than the value, but the app authors aren't paying the bill.

If you're plugging in your 5W charger for less than half the day, the limit is maybe $2/year/user, assuming you can get away with it for a year...

TrainedMonkey2• 12 years ago

$2 is way too high. I would say a cent per week tops.

warp• 12 years ago

Let's say 5W for 8 hours per day, that's 14 kWh per year.

Last year I paid 17.51 eurocents per kWh, so it would be EUR 2.45 per year for me ($3.37 per year).

gargarplex2• 12 years ago

am curious which if any android AV providers caught this

kawliga2• 12 years ago

I wonder if one could create a pyramid scheme app out of this? An invite only one.

1st guy - 100% mining load & all profit.

2nd and 3rd guy split the mining load and 99.99% of the profit.

and so on...

kawliga2• 12 years ago

wait... forget invite only - anyone could download.

Your rank would depend upon how early you became a member and how often you leave the app running. The mining load would increase/decrease depending upon how many users are running the app at the time.

Also, place ads on the app.

riffraff• 12 years ago

http://wowsuchponzi.com/

svas4• 12 years ago

I've been working on an idea similar to this for a few months. Instead of limiting this to crypto currency mining (a fair application, FWIW), why not approach this with the idea that people plugging in their phones every night could easily constitute the largest distributed supercomputer ever built? Everyone has the same nightly ritual: Wake up, use phone/tablet/device, plug in at night. Once it's plugged in, your phone charges to 100% after a few hours, and then essentially sits there for x hours effectively doing nothing (that's a little sensationalist, but it highlights my point). Folding@Home, et al have done this before, but the silver bullet here is that no one turns off their phone when it charges at night - perhaps to maintain the off chance they receive a random 4 AM phone call.

Now if you can combine this with an SDK (say... something Javascript based) that makes it easy to write/deploy compute jobs/"apps", you have a real distributed computing platform. You can also maintain security by using a similar proof-of-work scheme that bitcoin uses to prevent fraudulent mining.

The real challenge here is incentivizing people to run your app. Here's my sign up form for an early private beta for anyone who is interested.

http://stynt.co

dclusin• 12 years ago

I thought of this as well, but more along the lines of protein folding. I think finding a cure for one of those diseases would be more than enough for most people to justify the power consumption.

svas4• 12 years ago

Folding@Home, and the BOINC network over at Berkeley have done a great job at this already. http://boinc.berkeley.edu

There's still an immense opportunity to tap unused cycles if you give people another reason to donate their device time. Unfortunately, altruistic purposes don't always appeal to the masses :-)

zodiac• 12 years ago

I could see it being used for protein folding, but I don't think cryptocurrency mining is an application. By running your app, I'm consuming extra electricity for which I would have to pay. How would you compensate me for that?

svas4• 12 years ago

The basic crux of how the app works is similar to how regular bitcoin miners work. As you run the app, the app runs compute jobs (known as Stynts) which generates proof-of-work (that it did something) and sends it up to our servers. The more you run the app, the more proof-of-work you generate. You get rewarded via virtual currency (we assign to you) when you successfully run a Stynt which can then be exchanged for real goods.

Of course, the amount you get compensated should feel valuable and commensurate to the "effort" your device expended for this to be worthwhile. It largely boils down to user expectations, but given economics of scale, I'm confident that we can have more than a 1:1 ROI of effort to reward.

zimpenfish• 12 years ago

Why not link it to the World Community Grid?

http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/

(although they mention smartphones already)

Nursie3• 12 years ago

Errr.... I know that phone chargers draw some power even when the phone isn't charging, but surely it's orders of magnitude less than what they draw when the attached device is running at full capacity.

Not to mention how hot the damn things could get.

So it's going to cost me electricity and probably shorten the life of my phone - why would I sign up?

svas4• 12 years ago

The app actually monitors the battery temperature (exposed on all Android phones) and throttles down when it exceeds a certain threshold.

The charging circuitry on some phones (not all) actually disengages the battery from the charging circuit path once 100% AC power is reached. In other words your phone's CPU runs off of AC power (and not via the battery) once 100% charge is reached.

Why you would sign up is where it gets interesting - the app works via a similar incentivization scheme as how bitcoin miners work - the more you run the app (mine) the likelier you stumble upon a valid proof of work, and you get rewarded by virtual currency.

Rasmase• 12 years ago

What is the hashrate on these? Could'nt imagine it being very high...

logicchains• 12 years ago

I wonder how viable doing this openly would be as a free-to-play business model? Being upfront with the user: "we're not going to show you any ads and you won't have to pay anything for extra content, but we'll be using a tiny proportion of your CPU time to mine cryptocurrency to pay for the development costs of this app."

kevingadd2• 12 years ago

It was done secretly in the recent past, and apparently while it lasted (weeks, i think?) it brought in something like $6k. It helps that most gamers have fairly powerful graphics cards.

If you mapped bitcoins mined to microtransaction currency (for in-game rewards) most players would love it.

ckuehl• 12 years ago

Not sure if this is what you're referring to, but this was done last year in secret by ESEA, a US gaming league (primarily Counter-Strike) [1].

They claim the value was almost USD$4,000 over about two weeks, although we don't really know how many users were affected and for how long. This doesn't seem like an extraordinary amount, though, especially if we're talking about using mobile phones instead of high-end gaming PCs.

[1] http://www.pcgamer.com/2013/05/01/esea-accidentally-release-...

apaprocki• 12 years ago

Careful.. The New Jersey DA is trying to go after an MIT student for simply exploring the freemium mining concept at a hackathon. He got MIT and the EFF to back him, but there are probably others looking to make an example out of someone.

http://venturebeat.com/2014/02/12/new-jersey-slaps-mit-bitco...

ethanbond• 12 years ago

Yep, at RPI we had a research project doing something a bit similar by tying bitcoin transactions to the HTTP protocol itself to enable on-the-fly payments with an alternative of on-the-fly mining.

RPI lawyers told us to stop after we asked for counsel due to money transmitter laws. A few months later the MIT kid got hit with a subpoena. Bullet dodged for us but I really hope he pulls through with a win.

endersshadow• 12 years ago

This is the thing that worries me the most about Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies--because I want them to succeed--there are myriad laws surrounding money transfers, especially electronically. There are tax implications, as well. There are also huge trade agreements internationally--and even intranationally--that come into play, as well. Banks and credit card companies currently handle most of the legality of these things, but with cryptocurrencies, there are no banks--these are essentially cash transactions.

I expect more and more folks will start to "discover" the real legal implications of some of these types of applications. I'm sure we'll see some story or what have you, and we'll all cry foul, even though the laws have been in place for many years and we mostly (albeit somewhat unknowingly) abide by them.

I also expect that folks will "discover" why we have central banks for currencies, and why Alexander Hamilton was a Smart Guy.

While cryptocurrencies are new, the problems they'll face aren't--in fact, we've solved these problems mostly in developed countries. They still exist pretty readily in developing countries, though. What happens when we start selling securities based around cryptocurrencies, such as derivatives? If you think the SEC will allow Americans to buy, sell, and even discuss securities openly, you are out of your mind.

What about money laundering? When/if you ever work for a bank or an investment firm in the US, you'll take some training around money laundering (there are even tests at the end). The SEC (allegedly) holds these firms responsible for spotting, reporting, and stopping money laundering schemes. What happens when money laundering happens over an exchange? How will that be handled?

Sorry for the long-windedness...your anecdote just got me thinking.

wcfields• 12 years ago

I had this as a day dream a month ago. Though it would work as in-app currency that I would give to the users and the servers / aws bill would be subsidized by the collective micromining.

vlasev• 12 years ago

Why not make an app that uses your phone during charging at night to mine coins for charity?

blueskin_• 12 years ago

This is why the permissions model needs to be improved - not just to deny/grant normal ones, but also to stop apps from unexpectedly running in the background.

yoodenvranx• 12 years ago

Are there any example where somebody used Javascript on a website to do something like this?

stefan_kendall3• 12 years ago

Users don't want to pay, and they don't want ads.

The scale has to tip eventually.

gldalmaso• 12 years ago

They also don't want malware.

dublinben• 12 years ago

Thankfully there's an excellent repository full of free software with no ads.

F-Droid.org in case you've never heard of it.

zemanel• 12 years ago

Saddens me how low people can go for one or many bucks.

rmrfrmrf• 12 years ago

It's always good to see Android users enjoying their freedom from Apple's tyranny.

donniezazen• 12 years ago

No wonder Songs is an app to download pirated Bollywood songs.

IgorPartola• 12 years ago

I wonder if the new mobile GPU's are any good at mining scrypt-based currencies. It's possible that this could be fairly profitable. I don't think that long term this is going to replace ads though. Cryptocurrencies are too volatile at this point and I'd wager that ads are going to continue being much more profitable.

ryeguy_24• 12 years ago

Sorry, irrespective of the legality or morality, this is quite a creative idea.

signa11• 12 years ago

would you like 1024 chickens or 2 oxen ?

Apps with millions of Google Play downloads covertly mine cryptocurrency

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