7 ms·

Harvard supercomputing cluster hijacked to mine Dogecoin

115 points by fournm 13y ago

logfromblammo 13y ago
I have heard people say that scrypt is better than SHA256 as a basis for cryptocurrency because it doesn't put all the network power in specialist ASIC boxes, but then stuff like this happens. Do you think Harvard would have paid for a custom-build scrypt-coin miner if someone wrote a real academic proposal for it?
- mkeung 13y ago
  I don't see why not, custom-built just means grabbing consumer grade gpus, with the "best" one currently the R9 270, which is ~$200 usd each. I don't think you need a huge budget so for academic reasons, why not. Plus, there are many scrypt coins out there (or they could even create harvardcoin) they could use for research purposes. Don't need to necessarily use the mainstream profitable ones
- steveklabnik 13y ago
  There have been some claims that an scrypt ASIC is coming soon, but I think it's mostly vapor so far.
  - mkeung 13y ago
    From my understanding, scrypt ASICs have been held back by the cost of memory hardware as scrypt requires more memory usage. There has been talk of forking existing scrypt currencies to require even more memory to counter ASICs further but so far I think only a few new coins have done this.
    - jcampbell1 13y ago
      My understanding is the scrypt currencies use the lowest possible memory factor, which was just stupid.
      - tromp 13y ago
        Its memory requirement of 128KB is a compromise between computation-hardness for the prover and verification efficiency for the verifier. You don't want verification of a proof-of-work to take a lot of resources, since every client has to perform it.
  - wmf 13y ago
    Gridseed is shipping. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=477709.0 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=477709.0
- maaku 13y ago
  scrypt ASICs have better performance relatives to GPUs or CPUs than sha256 ASICs did.
mkeung 13y ago
If cryptocurrencies become mainstream, this will be a bigger problem I think. Even things like "free" electricity are attractive for mining purposes, ex: universities, businesses, etc. If every student setup mining, it adds up (at the university / business' expense). If I am the one paying for an office at $500 a month that includes all electricity usage, is it fair to plug in a ton of mining hardware and profit / subsidize myself? What if I manage to use more than $500 worth of electricity? Is shared space even setup for monitoring individual renter's usage behavior? I don't think so. edit: note, I do mine Doge but with my own stuff at home
- cmelbye 13y ago
  That's a dead simple problem to fix. Just don't allow for unlimited free access to resources used for crypto currency mining.
  - mkeung 13y ago
    but in a large building / campus, they can't possibly monitor electricity usage per individual or company occupying the space without upgrading the infrastructure significantly.
    - pavel_lishin 13y ago
      I'm imagining a future where every 'public' power outlet has a credit card reader attached.
      - infruset 13y ago
        You mean a bitcoin interface, surely :-)
        saraid216 13y ago
        That sounds like an infinite loop waiting to happen.
heydenberk 13y ago
I'm hopeful that future cryptocurrencies won't be so energy-intensive to mine. Bitcoin is already a non-negligible contributor to global CO2 emissions, believe it or not. EDIT: Reversible computing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversible_computing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversible_computing) is a possible way to have computationally difficult proof-of-work while minimizing energy consumption.
- chc 13y ago
  How do you make something incapable of being energy-intensive but still difficult? The more computers have to work at something, the more energy they use. I'm not the world's leading expert, but I don't see a way around that.
  - Crito 13y ago
    There is being energy intensive, and then there is being CPU intensive. You could imagine a hypothetical coin that somehow uses proof of data storage and retrieval instead of proof of work. Producing and running tons of harddrives would still require power, but it would be a less.. direct.. requirement.
    - SkynetSystems 13y ago
      And hundreds of thousands or millions of destroyed hard drives would be better for the environment how?
  - heydenberk 13y ago
    Short answer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversible_computing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversible_computing
    - tlrobinson 13y ago
      Could you explain this a little more, I'm having a hard time seeing how it applies to mining.
  - deleted 13y ago
waiquoo 13y ago
ha, wasn't me
- mgoszcz2 13y ago
  So it was you?
  - waiquoo 13y ago
    see my comment history...
fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
I'm currently "ignoring" a similar effort in my lab (~20 workstations). I don't think they've broken a MHash/s yet out of an estimated potential ~2-3MH.
- 46Bit 13y ago
  We recently received an email about our Comp Sci labs (300+ GPU-equipped workstations) being used for bitcoin mining at night.
  - fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
    I hope not to receive a similar one. I overheard them talking about using an external stratum proxy, maybe they'll also use ssl/ssh.
notacoward 13y ago
Would it really surprise anyone if it was revealed that stuff like this already happened with Bitcoin? Seriously, give a bunch of hackers with access to racks full of Other People's Machines, plus an obvious way to turn cycles into money, and the only surprise would be if they didn't take advantage of the opportunity. I for one expect this to be the norm for every cryptocurrency from now until the end of time. The only question is how much of it the rest of the world is willing to tolerate.
TeMPOraL 13y ago
Well, there you go. This kind of use was sorta obvious since the dawn of Bitcoin (and even before; in my high school people were running SETI@HOME screen savers on all school computers to build up ranking points for their team). I'm not sure why so many people act surprised.
plorg 13y ago
When xkcd's April Fools comic ran this year[1] I was doing some Real Work on a few of the engineering research servers at my university. When I noticed the jobs were going much slower than usual I popped open "top". Lo and behold, there were 20 instances of a program named 'xkcd', hashing violently, collectively using 90% of the CPU resources. I checked each of the other machines, and they too had been invaded by 'xkcd' daemons. Knowing that it would be over the next day, and that my job could wait, I figured I wouldn't try making trouble for the (presumably) undergraduate comic enthusiasts, but it sure was annoying. I found out later through reddit that there were at least three independent groups of students running the 'xkcd' hashing script on the servers. (A few had also spun up EC3 instances, so presumably they had a bit more skin in the game). If nerds will do this for nothing but internet points, it doesn't surprise me that semi-public resources will be exploited when there's a monetary incentive involved. [1]http://xkcd.com/1193 http://xkcd.com/1193
userbinator 13y ago
While I think there are many interesting properties of cryptocurrency and the potential applications, I also can't help but think that this mining is just an extreme waste of computing power; compared to other uses like research, application development, hosting a website, even gaming (entertainment), mining (use for heating aside) looks like it's not much more than using computing power for the sake of using computing power, which I find extremely disturbing.
ngcrawford 13y ago
As someone who's used the Odyssey cluster extensively, I can add that the most nodes I've run consecutively is ~ 500. While there are ~ 4000+ nodes on the cluster there's no way any single user could run that many simultaneously.
tod222 13y ago
From the article, Odyssey's Top500 page: http://www.top500.org/system/175596 http://www.top500.org/system/175596 It debuted in 61st place in 6/2008. By 11/2010 it had fallen to 434 and has since dropped entirely off the list. At 6 years old it's fairly long in the tooth now.
optymizer 13y ago
This was a young researcher who's access to the cluster was never revoked when they left a few years ago. Original e-mail Harvard sent last week: ------ Dear all, I really hate having to send notes like this to our community - especially one as smart, gifted and talented as you all are, but anyway here goes... Yesterday we were alerted to an unfortunate situation by one of our community members using the cluster who spotted an anomaly with a set of compute nodes. Long story short, a "dogecoin" (bitcoin derivative) mining operation had been set up on the cluster consuming significant resources in order to participate in a mining contest. I do want to also quickly state that we do not inspect, examine or look at algorithms and codes that are executing on the cluster, we respect your science and assume we are all good citizens. However, in the course of business, or as happened yesterday, if we are alerted to unexpected behavior we always investigate the cause of any issue. So, to put this simply: Harvard resources can not be used for any personal or private gain or any non research related activity. Accordingly, any participation in "Klondike" style digital mining operations or contests for profit requiring Harvard owned assets to examine digital currency key strength and length are strictly prohibited for fairly obvious reasons. In fact, any activities using our shared resources for any non scientific purpose that results or does not actually result in personal gain are also clearly and explicitly denied. As a result, and as guidance and as warning to you all, I do need to say that the individual involved in this particular operation no longer has access to any and all research computing facilities on a fully permanent basis. Don't let this happen to you.

115 points by fournm 13y ago

I have heard people say that scrypt is better than SHA256 as a basis for cryptocurrency because it doesn't put all the network power in specialist ASIC boxes, but then stuff like this happens. Do you think Harvard would have paid for a custom-build scrypt-coin miner if someone wrote a real academic proposal for it?

mkeung 13y ago
I don't see why not, custom-built just means grabbing consumer grade gpus, with the "best" one currently the R9 270, which is ~$200 usd each. I don't think you need a huge budget so for academic reasons, why not. Plus, there are many scrypt coins out there (or they could even create harvardcoin) they could use for research purposes. Don't need to necessarily use the mainstream profitable ones
steveklabnik 13y ago
There have been some claims that an scrypt ASIC is coming soon, but I think it's mostly vapor so far.
- mkeung 13y ago
  From my understanding, scrypt ASICs have been held back by the cost of memory hardware as scrypt requires more memory usage. There has been talk of forking existing scrypt currencies to require even more memory to counter ASICs further but so far I think only a few new coins have done this.
  - jcampbell1 13y ago
    My understanding is the scrypt currencies use the lowest possible memory factor, which was just stupid.
    - tromp 13y ago
      Its memory requirement of 128KB is a compromise between computation-hardness for the prover and verification efficiency for the verifier. You don't want verification of a proof-of-work to take a lot of resources, since every client has to perform it.
- wmf 13y ago
  Gridseed is shipping. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=477709.0 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=477709.0
maaku 13y ago
scrypt ASICs have better performance relatives to GPUs or CPUs than sha256 ASICs did.

mkeung 13y ago

If cryptocurrencies become mainstream, this will be a bigger problem I think. Even things like "free" electricity are attractive for mining purposes, ex: universities, businesses, etc. If every student setup mining, it adds up (at the university / business' expense). If I am the one paying for an office at $500 a month that includes all electricity usage, is it fair to plug in a ton of mining hardware and profit / subsidize myself? What if I manage to use more than $500 worth of electricity? Is shared space even setup for monitoring individual renter's usage behavior? I don't think so. edit: note, I do mine Doge but with my own stuff at home

cmelbye 13y ago
That's a dead simple problem to fix. Just don't allow for unlimited free access to resources used for crypto currency mining.
- mkeung 13y ago
  but in a large building / campus, they can't possibly monitor electricity usage per individual or company occupying the space without upgrading the infrastructure significantly.
  - pavel_lishin 13y ago
    I'm imagining a future where every 'public' power outlet has a credit card reader attached.
    - infruset 13y ago
      You mean a bitcoin interface, surely :-)
      - saraid216 13y ago
        That sounds like an infinite loop waiting to happen.

heydenberk 13y ago

I'm hopeful that future cryptocurrencies won't be so energy-intensive to mine. Bitcoin is already a non-negligible contributor to global CO2 emissions, believe it or not. EDIT: Reversible computing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversible_computing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversible_computing) is a possible way to have computationally difficult proof-of-work while minimizing energy consumption.

chc 13y ago
How do you make something incapable of being energy-intensive but still difficult? The more computers have to work at something, the more energy they use. I'm not the world's leading expert, but I don't see a way around that.
- Crito 13y ago
  There is being energy intensive, and then there is being CPU intensive. You could imagine a hypothetical coin that somehow uses proof of data storage and retrieval instead of proof of work. Producing and running tons of harddrives would still require power, but it would be a less.. direct.. requirement.
  - SkynetSystems 13y ago
    And hundreds of thousands or millions of destroyed hard drives would be better for the environment how?
- heydenberk 13y ago
  Short answer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversible_computing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversible_computing
  - tlrobinson 13y ago
    Could you explain this a little more, I'm having a hard time seeing how it applies to mining.
- deleted 13y ago

waiquoo 13y ago

ha, wasn't me

mgoszcz2 13y ago
So it was you?
- waiquoo 13y ago
  see my comment history...

fnordfnordfnord 13y ago

I'm currently "ignoring" a similar effort in my lab (~20 workstations). I don't think they've broken a MHash/s yet out of an estimated potential ~2-3MH.

46Bit 13y ago
We recently received an email about our Comp Sci labs (300+ GPU-equipped workstations) being used for bitcoin mining at night.
- fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
  I hope not to receive a similar one. I overheard them talking about using an external stratum proxy, maybe they'll also use ssl/ssh.

notacoward 13y ago

Would it really surprise anyone if it was revealed that stuff like this already happened with Bitcoin? Seriously, give a bunch of hackers with access to racks full of Other People's Machines, plus an obvious way to turn cycles into money, and the only surprise would be if they didn't take advantage of the opportunity. I for one expect this to be the norm for every cryptocurrency from now until the end of time. The only question is how much of it the rest of the world is willing to tolerate.

TeMPOraL 13y ago

Well, there you go. This kind of use was sorta obvious since the dawn of Bitcoin (and even before; in my high school people were running SETI@HOME screen savers on all school computers to build up ranking points for their team). I'm not sure why so many people act surprised.

plorg 13y ago

When xkcd's April Fools comic ran this year[1] I was doing some Real Work on a few of the engineering research servers at my university. When I noticed the jobs were going much slower than usual I popped open "top". Lo and behold, there were 20 instances of a program named 'xkcd', hashing violently, collectively using 90% of the CPU resources. I checked each of the other machines, and they too had been invaded by 'xkcd' daemons. Knowing that it would be over the next day, and that my job could wait, I figured I wouldn't try making trouble for the (presumably) undergraduate comic enthusiasts, but it sure was annoying. I found out later through reddit that there were at least three independent groups of students running the 'xkcd' hashing script on the servers. (A few had also spun up EC3 instances, so presumably they had a bit more skin in the game). If nerds will do this for nothing but internet points, it doesn't surprise me that semi-public resources will be exploited when there's a monetary incentive involved. [1]http://xkcd.com/1193 http://xkcd.com/1193

userbinator 13y ago

While I think there are many interesting properties of cryptocurrency and the potential applications, I also can't help but think that this mining is just an extreme waste of computing power; compared to other uses like research, application development, hosting a website, even gaming (entertainment), mining (use for heating aside) looks like it's not much more than using computing power for the sake of using computing power, which I find extremely disturbing.

ngcrawford 13y ago

As someone who's used the Odyssey cluster extensively, I can add that the most nodes I've run consecutively is ~ 500. While there are ~ 4000+ nodes on the cluster there's no way any single user could run that many simultaneously.

tod222 13y ago

From the article, Odyssey's Top500 page: http://www.top500.org/system/175596 http://www.top500.org/system/175596 It debuted in 61st place in 6/2008. By 11/2010 it had fallen to 434 and has since dropped entirely off the list. At 6 years old it's fairly long in the tooth now.

optymizer 13y ago

This was a young researcher who's access to the cluster was never revoked when they left a few years ago. Original e-mail Harvard sent last week: ------ Dear all, I really hate having to send notes like this to our community - especially one as smart, gifted and talented as you all are, but anyway here goes... Yesterday we were alerted to an unfortunate situation by one of our community members using the cluster who spotted an anomaly with a set of compute nodes. Long story short, a "dogecoin" (bitcoin derivative) mining operation had been set up on the cluster consuming significant resources in order to participate in a mining contest. I do want to also quickly state that we do not inspect, examine or look at algorithms and codes that are executing on the cluster, we respect your science and assume we are all good citizens. However, in the course of business, or as happened yesterday, if we are alerted to unexpected behavior we always investigate the cause of any issue. So, to put this simply: Harvard resources can not be used for any personal or private gain or any non research related activity. Accordingly, any participation in "Klondike" style digital mining operations or contests for profit requiring Harvard owned assets to examine digital currency key strength and length are strictly prohibited for fairly obvious reasons. In fact, any activities using our shared resources for any non scientific purpose that results or does not actually result in personal gain are also clearly and explicitly denied. As a result, and as guidance and as warning to you all, I do need to say that the individual involved in this particular operation no longer has access to any and all research computing facilities on a fully permanent basis. Don't let this happen to you.