Beware of Bitmain - The Antbleed Backdoor in your miners!

[LiteCoinGuy]

The Antbleed Backdoor

Antbleed is a backdoor introduced by Bitmain into the firmware of their bitcoin mining hardware Antminer.

The firmware checks-in with a central service randomly every 1 to 11 minutes. Each check-in transmits the Antminer serial number, MAC address and IP address. Bitmain can use this check-in data to cross check against customer sales and delivery records making it personally identifiable. The remote service can then return "false" which will stop the miner from mining.

http://www.antbleed.com/

Remember how they said they could easily make sure only 1 chain would survive with a fork? If you can kill off miners on the other chain...

Don´t buy or install these malicious software & products!
Bitmain is an enemy of the bitcoin ecosystem and should be treated like that!

[mocacinno]

I always knew they were evil... Their support horror stories are sufficient proof about their intentions, as is the fact that it's allmost certain they mine with customer's hardware and they have monetary incentives to influence the developmentpath of btc....

That being said: what kind of reply does the antminer expect after sending the data? If it's just true or false, you could potentially use a rPi between your antminer and your router, use this rpi as gateway for your antminers and let the rPi just anwer the antminer query?

I haven't completely tought it trough, but my first idear would be to use iptables to route all traffic to bitmain to localhost on the rpi, and create a python deamon listing on the ports where the antminer sends it's requests to, then return whatever value the antminer wants.

Ofcourse, if the antminer doesn't expect true/false, it might be a bit more complex.

Also, even if the problem is "fixable" with a workaround, i still find the business practices of bitmain sad (to say the leasts

[whatmaybemaybe]

happened to a friend on mine, he bought a usb miner , it seemed to work,, but all it really did , was to allow access to his computer, and he lost everything from his wallets in the process..