We named the extension as MiNo with the shortcut of words "Mine" and "No". According to the many marketing researches; simple, short and easy to remember names more likely to be remembered by user and preferred over the long named competitors. In this case, we believe MiNo will get ahead with short, phonetic and sympathetic name against competitors such as NoCoin, NoMiner, CoinBlock etc.
The add-on MiNo was developed and configured for Google Chrome Developer Channel which is the newest version of Google Chrome web browser. The reason for choosing the developer channel instead of the stable channel is, currently CPU-usage control information can be reached only in the developer channel and this is one of the main function of MiNo to detect and block the malicious processes using high percentage of CPU usage. However, these features provided in the developer channel are expected to be available in the stable channel in near future with the updates and newer versions of Chrome web browser's stable channel.
MiNo has not been published to Chrome's extension market yet so it needs to be manually installed. Users need to go to the Extensions page on Chrome and activate the developer mode. Then the folder contains source code files of MiNo can be dragged and dropped to the Chrome browser to complete the installation. Once these steps completed, icon will appear on the top right side of the browser and MiNo will be ready to use.
MiNo's icon will appear on the right top part of the Chrome web browser within the installation. This is the default location of Chrome web browser for extensions. When the MiNo's icon is clicked, he starting page of MiNo will open on a popup page. Main controls of he MiNo located in this popup page including enable/disable control, settings where user can change the controls and history where nformation and records of the detected or blocked incidents kept. User can enable or disable the program anytime with clicking the icon and use the enable/disable button on the popup page. This function is useful when the user will voluntarily visit websites has cryptominer or any page use higher CPU rate with the user's consent. MiNo can be enabled back anytime user wishes without closing or reopening the browser since Enable/Disable function works instantly.
MiNo provides flexible controls for users to personalize the controls or their preferences to have better functionality. When the icon clicked on the browser, popup page will open and at the bottom of the popup page "Settings" button is displayed which allow users to reach the controls page to check or change the controls. When the user clicks the button, it takes user to a new page displaying the options on a new tab on browser.
There are four main controls provided under settings. Controls listed with a checkbox on the left side allowing user to enable or disable the function by clicking the checkbox. Details, functions and working principals of the MiNo on the background will be reviewed with details in the next chapter. We will review the basic functionality of these controls in this section.
First control is "Block cryptominer scripts and URLs". This option is controlling the function of checking the malicious scripts and URLs contain cryptominers from the blacklist. User can use the checkbox to either enable or disable this function. If the user disable this option then MiNo will not be blocking the website according to malicious scripts and URLs instead, it will only be demanding on CPU usage control function to protect the system. Details of this protection mechanism works in the background will be explained in next chapter.
The second option is "Show warning badge layered over the icon". Checkbox allows user to enable or disable the option of having a badge placement feature on the extension's icon on the top right of the browser whenever a threat detected, which is one of the visual warning systems of the program.
The third option is "Show notification and history of cryptominers". This checkbox allows user to enable or disable the notifications displayed whenever a threat detected or blocked which is the second visual warning system. This option also allows user to log the history of the threats detected or blocked in the history section which we will review in the next chapter.
The last option is "Block CPU-hungry processes". This checkbox allows user to enable or disable the function of checking and blocking the processes using high CPU rate. This is the second layer of protection of the MiNo and the main feature separating MiNo from the competitors n the market. When MiNo is enabled, it is continuously communicating with the task manager of the Chrome web browser to check the CPU usage rate of the running processes and blocking the processes using higher han the default or user preferred value set. There is a default percentage rate set in the function for the CPU usage in the system which is 80 however, the dropdown menu located under this last checkbox allows user to change this value of CPU usage to be blocked. Details and deep analysis of the mechanism will be reviewed in the next chapter.
There is also another tab on the Settings page calls "About". This page provides information including the version of the program, contact information of the developer and credits.
MiNo is keeping the records of the detected threats with various information. The page this information displayed can be reached from the "History" button on the main popup page of the program. When user clicks the button, a new page on a new tab will be opened to display the records. There are four different information is being recorded and displayed in this page such as "Date and Time", "Page Title", "Page URL" and "Bad Script/Process". Date and time shows exact date and time of the detection and all records ordered by this information chronologically. Date is displayed in MM/DD/YYYY format and time is displayed in HR:MN:SC AM/PM format. Page title provides the title and Page URL provides the complete URL of the website where malicious event detected. Last column calls Bad Script/Process provides the information of the detected malicious script, URL or process. Records will be held until it is cleared manually by the user. There is "Clear History" button located on the top right of the history page. User can click this button to clear the current records. History page can be reached easily by clicking the MiNo icon and clicking the history button anytime on the browser.
We reviewed the general details of the user interface and features of the MiNo including installation, design, functions and user controls. In the next chapter, we will review the details of the security mechanism of the MiNo running on background.
MiNo consists of two main mechanisms to detect the malicious processes and protect the system resources from being used without the user's consent. First mechanism is scanning the website user visiting to check the malicious scripts and URLs from the blacklist. Second mechanism is checking the CPU usage rate of each process running on browser from the task manager to detect any malicious activity.
MiNo collects the malicious cryptominer scripts and URLs from an external file calls filters.txt inside the assets folder when it is installed into the Chrome browser. These filters in the file have been acquired from various resources including previous works and online resources. Once the MiNo have collected the filters, it can access to the resources and requests of the web page before opening the web page using a special function "chrome.webRequest.onBeforeRequest" provided by the Chrome API. This function allows MiNo to have enough time to check the content before a web request is made by Chrome. Thereupon, MiNo scans the resources of the web page to check if there is any malicious script or URL. There are three possible results at this point. If there is no malicious script or URL found, then web page will be loaded regularly without any change or block by MiNo. If MiNo detects only malicious script or scripts in the content, it would continue to serve the web page to the user however, it will prevent the malicious script from being included in the web request. Since the script is not included in the web request, it cannot run on the background. In this case, MiNo will only block the malicious content and let the user to access the web page without any threat to computer resources.
On the other hand, if MiNo detects any malicious URL, it will block the whole web page and will not let user to access to the web page in order to protect the system resources. While this process is running, user is being informed by the notification and badge on the icon depending on user preferences on settings. Also, as we mention in the previous chapter, this control mechanism can be disabled from settings without disabling the program itself.
Second mechanism is based on controlling the CPU usage rate of the processes running on the Chrome web browser. MiNo controls the CPU usage of the processes and blocks the malicious processes using higher CPU rate than the set value. Hence, this is the biggest and most important difference of MiNo from its competitors. All the competitors in the market provide only script and/or URL scanning and consist of single layer of protection while MiNo has two different mechanisms work together to back up each other for a better protection. We will review the details and functions providing the CPU usage control and blocking mechanism below.
There is a separate process created in the background for each content working on Chrome such as web pages and add-on applications and various information including name, CPU usage, network usage etc. of these processes can be accessed by task manager and Chrome API. Currently this API support is only available on the Chrome Developer Channel and this is the main reason for us to choose Chrome Developer Channel for MiNo.
MiNo uses Chrome Process API actively on this mechanism. Since there are many systems run in internet today with different kinds of CPUs and these CPUs have different number of cores. Chrome processes can use all the CPU cores, and each core usage is represented as a percentage of the CPU usage. In other words, CPU usage can be between 0-800 range in a system with 8-core CPU while it can be 0-200 range in a system with 2-core CPU. In this case, we first designed MiNo to determine the number of the cores of CPU through the Chrome API and use variable limit of the CPU usage rate accordingly. However, after our detailed tests in both "known malicious websites" and "known clean websites" this method did not work as efficient as planned. There were many false-positive results appeared during the tests. At this point, we redesigned the CPU usage control function with a single set value regardless of the number of CPU cores. After a careful review of the experiment and test results we determined the optimum value for the limit is 80%. However, users can still adjust the default value of limit of high CPU usage from the settings page. Tests with lower values had too many false positives and harmless processes like YouTube blocked by MiNo. In fact, even with the current settings, some harmless processes using high CPU rate can be blocked by MiNo. In order to prevent this, MiNo uses a 10 second continuous control to detect harmful processes over the harmless ones.
All processes that are actively running in Chrome are listened on the background and the CPU usage is controlled every time the resource usage of the processes is updated. If any process momentarily exceeds the limit of high CPU usage, MiNo marks this process as suspicious and starts to watch it for 10 seconds. MiNo calculates the average of CPU usage rate of these 10 second period and if this average value is over 80% then this process is marked as harmful and blocked. User will be notified with either badge over the icon and/or popup notification according to the preferences. MiNo also keeps records of the blocked processes in the history page with details.
Another feature of the MiNo in this mechanism is, once a process using high CPU is blocked is also recorded in the CPU hungry process list on the background, and whenever the same process is created again, it will be blocked instantly. One of the greatest feature of MiNo in this mechanism is it will control not only the web pages but also add-ons. Whenever an extension is installed and run on Chrome by the user, there will be a process created for this extension. Since MiNo controls all the running processes regardless of the type, in case if there is any malicious software exist in the extension will be blocked by MiNo due to high CPU usage. However, Google recently filtered and removed most of the harmful extensions from the Chrome market hence we could test this feature on only one add-on in experiment section for now.
(c) Copyright Safa Berat AKTEPE 2018-2019.
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