Cryptocurrency Security Study based on Static Taint Analysis

Abstract

Cryptocurrency represented by Bitcoin is a very popular topic in recent years. However, the prosperity of cryptocurrency drives an increasing number of applications published. Some malicious or vulnerable programs are also detected and reported these years. To do a deeper study into security of cryptocurrency application, this paper learns common vulnerabilities, threat models inside normal applications, and taint analysis, a useful vulnerability-detecting tool, concludes a common and useful methodology for threat detection in application programs, especially Android apps. This approach uses static taint analysis to detect vulnerabilities inside a given Android application, classify them into common vulnerability categories and then make conclusions. This paper does research in analyzing statistics of threats in common cryptocurrency apps in Google play store and draw conclusions on the status of cryptocurrency software as well. Finally, some suggestions are provided at the end of this paper. These recommendations apply to application programmers, app store administrators, scholars and experts in related area, government officer and users. This set of analysis process can be applied to analyze any type of application programs.