ZombieCoin3.0: On the Looming of a Novel Botnet Fortified by Distributed Ledger Technology and Internet of Things

Abstract

P2P Botnet is famous for the resilience against termination. However, its dependence on Neighbor List (NL) makes it susceptible to infiltration and poison, also leading to a dearth of adequate protection of Botmaster's identity. So as to overcome these weaknesses, the novel botnet infrastructure combined with blockchain emerges. But due to some flaws such like high latency and expensive transactions fees on blockchain, these new schemes can't satisfy the need of constructing hyper large-scale botnet in practice. We propose ZombieCoin3.0, a Botnet underlying overlay leveraging IoT devices to be maintainers and integrated with Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT), which is able to deploy bots fully on blockchain. And it is versatile for file transfer, data feedback and other command and control scenarios that many contemporaries are impotent to cope with. Our proposal eliminates the P2P botnets' dependence on NL and the bottlenecks that other blockchain combined botnets have. Experiments' results authenticated that the effectiveness of our proposal as well as low latency of communication and nearly zero overhead of cost other comparatives unable to attain are achieved.