Novel MITM attack scheme based on built-in negotiation for blockchain-based digital twins

As smart contracts, represented by Solidity, become deeply integrated into the manufacturing industry, blockchain-based Digital Twins (DT) has gained momentum in recent years. Most of the blockchain infrastructures in widespread use today are based on the Proof-of-Work (PoW) mechanism, and the process of creating blocks is known as “mining”. Mining becomes increasingly difficult as the blockchain grows in size and the number of on-chain business systems increases. To lower the threshold of participation in the mining process, “mining pools” have been created. Miners can cooperate and share the mining rewards according to the hashrate they contributed to the pool. Stratum is the most widely used communication protocol between miners and mining pools. Its security is essential for the participants. In this paper, we propose two novel Man-In-The-Middle (MITM) attack schemes against Stratum, which allow attackers to steal miners' hashrate to any mining pool using hijacked TCP connections. Compared with existing attacks, our work is more secretive, more suitable for the real-world environment, and more harmful. The Proof-of-Concept (PoC) shows that our schemes work perfectly on most mining softwares and pools. Furthermore, we present a lightweight AI-driven approach based on protocol-level feature analysis to detect Stratum MITM for blockchain-based DTs. Its detection model consists of three layers: feature extraction layer, vectorization layer, and detection layer. Experiments prove that our detection approach can effectively detect Stratum MITM traffic with 98% accuracy. Our work alerts the communities and provides possible mitigation against these more hidden and profitable attack schemes.