How to Remove Donald Trump Virus/Script from Linux?

Today have been a bad day, at 3AM in the morning, received an email alert from Alibaba Cloud indicating successful brute force attacks to a few of my ECS servers. It was my mistake for not changing the server SSH default port, given the chance to the hacker to brute force attack my server access.

I discover what the hacker did to my ECS server is creating a cron job that constantly compile and generate 2 executable scripts call Donald and Trump. The scripts spike my server CPU to 100% and affecting my other application process being slow in performance.

How do I find the root if you ask me? Just run the top command and then press C, you will see the Donald script is running and eating the 100% CPU and also its source location. However, I spotted there is an unknown suspicious process actively running as well.

By deleting Donald and Trump executable scripts will not solve the problem. I discover that there is a cron job running to automatically compile and create both Donald and Trump scripts after a while.

So, I run the systemctl status command in order to further trace which and where actually started the process.

systemctl status <PID>

As you can see from the above screenshot, the culprits are:
/tmp/Donald
/usr/bin/ujwofa5

Also note that there is a cron job actually execute ujwofa5. Therefore, we need to remove all the executable scripts and cron job as well.

In order to trace the cron job, just run crontab -l command
For deleting the cron job, run crontab -r command
You may want to stop the cron job if you dont need it at all, just run service crond stop

Now, remove the Donald script and ujwofa5 by executing rm command. Then, kill both processes.

Now, you need to reboot the server in order to permanently remove the script to take effect. After server get back online, you can run top command again to monitor and see if the Donald or Trump script appear again. If everything goes normally, then the problem is considered solved.

It was lucky that Alibaba Cloud sent me email notification about suspicious login to my server actually triggered me to check what's wrong. Lesson learned that I should not being lazy even the server is not important, I should change the SSH default port.

For your knowledge how to change SSH default port, just login to the server again. Open up the SSH config file by executing command vi /etc/ssh/sshd_config

Modify the file by removing the # comment at the Port 22 row, then change the value 22 to your desire port number. Once done, save the file and then restart the SSH service by executing service sshd restart

Now, the server is resume back to normal. Let me know if this helpful, and note that the cron job script name is random and different from each server. You cannot assume your cron job script name is ujwofa5.

Alibaba Cloud MVP Global Summit

On the 24-27th of September, Alibaba Cloud MVP Global Summit and Apsara Conference was held at Hangzhou, it was an honor to be invited to participate in this event. On the first day itself, once I touch down the Hangzhou Xiaoshan Airport, I find there are free shuttle buses available to bring you from airport to hotels and conference venue.

The MVP Global Summit was held at The Cloud Town on the 24th September. It is a gathering for the domestic and international MVPs to get to know each other, and there are also sharing of Alibaba Cloud new company direction, new product milestone, and the experience of Alibaba Cloud product application.

During the event, I had made the acquaintance of the MVPs from China, Singapore, Japan, Spain and Netherlands. Since every MVP has his own area of expertise, it is interesting when everyone share their story, problem and insights about technology.

Also, I got a surprise during the event for receiving a most active MVP award. Thanks Alibaba Cloud for the recognition.

I personally find this event is a good opportunity to make new friends and broaden up our network. MVP Global Summit is a rare event that filled with technical experts from around the world come reunion together at one place, given the opportunity to meet with the person usually dealt from online to offline. Hope that next year we will be able to meet with each other again.

What Makes FiiiPay A Fast & Reliable Crypto Wallet in Asia?

FiiiPay had been launched ever since June, 2018. We had gone through a lot of obstacles from the beginning of the launch until today. In this article, I would like to share all my past experience about our FiiiPay system.

In August 2018, we organized security hackathon in Malaysia to invite hackers to attempt to hack or break into our API system, some even try to hijack the FiiiPOS terminal software, but all attempts were failed. The hackers managed to find minor bugs related to UI defects only.

Later in September 2018, we encountered hackers attack our API to create user account using fake mobile number in order to gain our FiiiCoin for free through the friend referral marketing campaign. However, we managed to stop it by applying stricter rules in order to earn the freebie. We were experiencing sudden surge of system load due to the script attack, and we addressed the issue by applying firewall rule base on the attack pattern.

During December 2018, our user base grew to 340,000 and 22,000 POS terminal online at the same time for FiiiCoin mining, active online users exceed 30,000 daily, server unable to cope the load. We decided to increase our server capacity and apply load balancing strategy.

Have you ever wonder what make us so efficient and change so fast to adapt to the situation? Thanks to Alibaba Cloud. If you are building a similar e-wallet application, you may consider take my solution as reference.

I am sure you are curious why Alibaba Cloud? Why not AWS? Why not Windows Azure? I had done a lot survey and testing, firstly my discovery is Alibaba Cloud Asia network performance is better compare to other cloud service provider, and in term of pricing, it is affordable. The consideration is depend on where is your business and where are your users location. My business focus on Asia market, hence Hong Kong is a strategic location where it is the center point of all Asia countries. Hong Kong is my best choice of data center location.

If you ask me why cloud? Why not on premise servers?

I would say my main consideration is costing. As a startup company, we need to survive by controlling the budget tightly, spend on things which are necessary only. On premise servers require high maintenance effort such as hiring DevOps or System Engineer to perform high availability, redundancy, regular backup, and disaster recovery. Furthermore, the local internet service provider provide limited network bandwidth and the charging fee is expensive. Therefore, Elastic Compute Service (ECS) by Alibaba Cloud provide the flexibility and solution that fit my requirement.

ECS allowed me to change the server specification anytime I want and quickly. While my system is suffering high load, and I need to temporary increase the server capacity including the network bandwidth, I can easily configure it through the Console.

Every software company practice System Integration Test (SIT) and User Acceptance Test (UAT), I find that ECS Pay-As-You-Go billing method gave me the flexibility to pay only when require. Most of the time, test servers are not in used unless test tasks being carried out. Hence, these test servers can be shutdown. Shut downed servers are not being charged except the used storage. It helped me save cost.

As an e-wallet solution provider, robust system and high availability are utmost important, we cannot afford down time as it will impact customer experience and affect the confidence level towards our product.

Database is a the heart of the entire system, it cannot be down not even a second. I like about ApsaraDB for RDS product. It enable me to provision a database in just a few minutes time. It gives me peace of mind in all the routine work such as differential backup, full backup, redundancy, replication and fail-over by just a few button click. Even the connection architecture is setup following the best practice.

Next is to provision the Server Load Balancer (SLB) for load distribution to different servers to support high concurrency. When single API server is unable to cope the concurrent requests, then you can opt for adding extra ECS instance to the share the load by having both ECS instances assigned into a Server Group of a SLB. The request will be distributed to the instances automatically.

Lastly, all the cloud services can be monitored. We can easily configure alarm rule to monitor ECS instances or RDS databases. If there is high CPU or RAM usage or the disk storage is running low, you will receive an alert in email form or notification in DingTalk.

In conclusion, by just relying on Alibaba Cloud service, you can run a full fledged IT operation for server, database and network with affordable price and enterprise level service. FiiiPay have been using Alibaba Cloud service for more than one year and never face any down time before and satisfied with the service.

FiiiPOS - FAQ

Background

FiiiCoin is designed to "incentivize" the contributors of the cryptocurrency payment ecosystem. Today the most common problem found in the blockchain world is a lot of cryptocurrencies are built for speculative investment but rarely being used for circulation and payment. Most of the people who purchase cryptocurrency always hope for a good return of investment instead of truly support a project. I am trying my best to correct everyone mindset.

There are very few merchants who actually support cryptocurrency and truly understand what is blockchain. The following are the commonly asked questions:

Why do I need FiiiPOS since I am happy accepting fiat currency now?

FiiiPOS is an extra payment accepting tool for you to accept payment from a different target group of customers who actually own cryptocurrency. It does not meant to be replaced by conventional credit card POS terminal. We treat it as "additional option".

How can I cash out the cryptocurrency?

At current stage, we enable simple payment accepting feature only in FiiiPOS. We are in the middle of working with multiple cryptocurrency Over The Counter (OTC) service provider to implement cash out feature - FiiiOTC into our FiiiPOS, allowing you to convert cryptocurrency into fiat currency in just one button click, and you will receive fiat currency in your bank account within 24 hours. Please stay tune for our FiiiOTC service by Q2 2019.

The volatility of cryptocurrency is high, how can I ensure my today's earning is not depreciated?

FiiiLab had foreseen such problem, hence we have FiiiExchange service to be rolled out by Q2 2019 as well in order to let our FiiiPOS merchants to quickly exchange high volatile crypto with a stable crypto (normally backed by fiat currency or real assets as a reserve such as USDT, GUSD, PAX, etc).

So that, merchant can secure the received value. At the end of the day, use FiiiOTC service to cash out the stable crypto into fiat currency. At this stage without FiiiExchange and FiiiOTC service, merchant can limit accepting only stable crypto from the customers.

Why mining in FiiiPOS?

FiiiPOS mining is an extra feature to attract and educate merchant to accept cryptocurrency. We intend to create one stone two birds effect whereby the merchant is being incentivized for using the FiiiPOS, generating a little income while the FiiiPOS is idle for charging, at the same time helping in maintaining our blockchain network.

I would like to emphasize to our FiiiPOS users that this device is not a mining machine. I hope this machine is put into good use. Let the true cryptocurrency circulation really happen.

How FiiiCoin mining work?

Delegate Proof of Capacity (DPoC) rely on the hashes that was pre-calculated and stored in a storage and then these hashes to be submitted to a dedicated mining pool. Therefore, during the very beginning stage of the mining work, FiiiPOS must initialize the nonce files first. It should take about 40 minutes to initialize 100MB of nonce. Once it is done, it will begin the mining work by submitting the nonce and hashes to the mining pool. The mining reward is distributed based on the quantity of hashes submitted to the mining pool that actually contributed to the block generation work. The mining reward is released daily at 2.00AM UTC +0800 and to be credited to your FiiiCoin wallet in your FiiiPOS by default.

Please take note that due to the nature mentioned above, you must expect the mining reward is very little due to the quantity of hashes submission to the mining pool is very limited. In order to achieve full hash rate, you need about 1 month time to initialize 29GB of nonce in your 32GB SD card (29GB is the usable storage of a 32GB SD card). Our FiiiPOS program that while submitting hashes to the mining pool, it utilize the 2nd CPU of the FiiiPOS to generate nonce. Hence, you will not need to stop the mining while generating nonce. In fact, you leave the mining on despite occasionally not able to connect to the mining pool, it will still generate nonce. Once the mining pool connection is established or restored, you can get into speed in submitting the nonce and then getting more reward.

Why my FiiiCoin mining keep showing 0 H/s hash rate in my FiiiPOS?

FiiiCoin mining is actually done by submitting hashes to the mining pool. However, due to the new FiiiPOS new empty SD card has very little of hashes, therefore, it take only a few seconds to finish uploading all the hashes that it has. You will see the hash rate will show some value for a few seconds then stop and become zero. The reason is you have finished submitting all the hashes that you have in your SD card.

What is verifying status during FiiiCoin mining?

The FiiiPOS is trying to connect to the FiiiCoin mining pool, however, due to the network is congested, it failed to establish connection. Hence, the status keep showing verifying which at the background it is trying to keep reconnect. However, please leave the machine on still as it is generating more nonce despite failed to connect to mining pool. So that, you can submit more nonce to the mining pool when it is able to connect to the mining pool.

When will FiiiCoin mining open for all users?

Currently, we only open mining for our merchants due to the reason that in order to attract merchant support our cause, we incentivize and appreciate our merchants who actually done the value contribution to the payment ecosystem first, lower down their risk of cost in purchasing the POS machine, transaction fee, withdrawal fee and also crypto volatility. We shall open mining for our consumer users when FiiiPOS adoption has achieved huge availability around the world.

With the limitation of funding and at the same time pushing the adoption, we leverage on the beauty of blockchain incentive tokenomic design to let the crypto community who are into the same belief, together achieve the mass adoption of cryptocurrency payment.

Why my country is not supported in the list in FiiiPOS and FiiiPay account registration?

We launch our product starting from our home ground which is Southeast Asia countries, attempt to build strong foundation, then stage by stage, gaining feedback, refine and enhance, then only go for mass market expansion.

During the mid or latest by end of November 2018, we will open account registration to all countries except some sanction countries.

Summary

FiiiLab strive to answer all the questions above and provide one stop solution to all our customers. We want and we will, be the world first cryptocurrency payment solution provider to everyone, then together all the cryptocurrencies achieve the same success by bringing true value of blockchain to the payment ecosystem.

Stay tune and thanks for your support!

Milestone Achieved - FiiiCoin Mining

New Milestone Achieved!

28 October 2018 is our FiiiCoin mining exact launch date. Hurray! We have deployed a patch to all our FiiiPOS terminal to enable mining FiiiCoin. Finally the FiiiCoin feature has completed one of the milestone in our road-map.

Misconception of Mining

Since our FiiiPOS has enabled for mining, I have received a lot of complaints, and yes, I have heard your voices, I acknowledged it. We are working hard on solving all the issues.

Firstly, our FiiiCoin mining pool is facing heavy network congestion. I can see thousands of active FiiiPOS has begun mining. The server unable to cope the sudden surge of concurrent connections, hence causing the mining force quit or occurrence of network error. We are in the middle of fine tuning the mining pool source code as as well increasing number of servers to solve this issue.

Secondly, base on the feedback that I have received, I find that the public has a misconception or wrong perception about "mining" in the blockchain world. The "mining" is an activity that contribute value to the blockchain ecosystem in return getting some incentive. For instance, Bitcoin, the person who contributed proof of work by competing being the first in finding the correct hash. Same concept applies to FiiiCoin.

The FiiiCoin mining reward is distributed base on the quantity of work that you had performed. Therefore, the key condition is the number of hashes that you had submitted to the mining pool. The following are the criteria that directly affect your FiiiCoin mining reward:

1. Hashes reading speed from SD card
2. Hashes submission to the mining pool base on network speed
3. Number of hashes initialized and plotted in SD card
4. The competition from other FiiiPOS

User Experience

FiiiCoin consensus is proof of capacity, hence, the mining cannot be kicked start immediately without plot files. You may read my previous article Delegate Proof of Capacity for more detail. Therefore, we enforce user to initialize 100MB size of plot files first prior to mining. It usually takes 40 minutes to 1 hour time to prepare the plot files depending on the SD card data writing speed. FiiiPOS can support up to 32GB SD card only.

Once the FiiiPOS has completed the 100MB plot files initialization, it will begin the mining at the same time plotting more files up to 29GB (32GB SD card usable space). Therefore, at the beginning of mining, you should expect very little FiiiCoin will be mined because of limited hashes contributed to the mining pool. You will need to wait 1 month time to get 29GB of SD card fully filled up with hashes. The reason is the 2 core CPU in FiiiPOS, one core will be used for mining, another core is to compute SHA3-256 hashes for file plotting.

Calculation & Assumption

FiiiCoin coinbase reward is 250 per block. Each block average generation time is 1 minute. Please take note that mining pool takes 10% pool fee to maintain the server cost and distribute to FiiiPOS referral campaign. Therefore, the reward left only 225 FiiiCoin to be shared and distributed to all the miners.

Assume there are 10,000 FiiiPOS mining at the same time and all are equal having 29GB of hashes:

225 / 10,000 = 0.0225 FiiiCoin per minute
which can generate up to 1.35 FiiiCoin per hour
which can generate up to 32.4 FiiiCoin per day
which can generate up to 972 FiiiCoin per month

The above condition is possible based on good network condition, mining pool no downtime, 24/7 FiiiPOS mining non-stop, and no new FiiiPOS join into the pool.

The early bird who participate in mining definitely earn more FiiiCoin compare to the later. When the quantity of FiiiPOS make available worldwide and all are participating in mining, the more mining reward to be shared and the gain will be reduced. You may use the same formula above to assume for 100,000 FiiiPOS.

Disclaimer

Please be informed that FiiiLab Technology Ltd does not guarantee the FiiiCoin mining reward. The FiiiCoin mining is done under user own willingness and due diligence. User is expected to fully understand the concept of FiiiCoin delegate proof of capacity consensus algorithm.

A Sad Situation

FiiiPOS is designed for cryptocurrency payment. The mining feature is to lower the risks for merchant to try accepting cryptocurrency payment. It is not easy to push the cryptocurrency adoption due to it is still skeptical to most of the people especially non-tech savvy. The mining feature can be a good start, a new concept, a revolutionary payment solution. The FiiiCoin original purpose is to ease the burden of merchant to pay the transaction fee, hardware cost and the value fluctuation at the same time help maintaining our blockchain network without additional hardware cost.

However, most of the individuals who purchase our FiiiPOS is to mine FiiiCoin. It has defeated our original purpose to create FiiiPOS. It is sad to see many FiiiPOS units have been kept in a warehouse just for mining. I hope every FiiiPOS owner please use it to circulate cryptocurrency. Only circulation can bring value to the ecosystem, not mining. I wish FiiiCoin will not be abused to become another speculative investment coin.

What's Next?

Our next target now is to solve merchant daily cash out problem, hence will begin our next milestone development - the FiiiOTC service to be included into the FiiiPOS and FiiiPay. We want to let our users and merchants to be able to convert cryptocurrency into fiat in just one button click.

FiiiLab strive to serve blockchain community with the best cryptocurrency payment one-stop solution in the world! Stay tune! And, thanks for your support!

Delegate Proof of Capacity

Today's topic is about the consensus algorithm - Delegate Proof of Capacity (DPoC) which we developed for FiiiCoin.

History

Proof of Capacity (PoC) or also known as Proof of Space (PoSpace) is a consensus algorithm originated from Burstcoin which is somehow similar to Proof of Work (PoW) that you can find in Bitcoin. However, PoC uses storage instead of computing power to perform proof of work. Burstcoin is the first cryptocurrency that uses PoC consensus in year 2014. 

Why PoC?

We like the idea of Burstcoin which is energy efficient for mining and the concept is just nice to fit into our FiiiPOS terminal to enable for mining. We all know that the hardware spec of a POS terminal is similar to a mobile phone. Mining a PoW crypto which is power hunger using mobile phones are unfeasible, considering the weak CPU, the heat generation and the battery lifespan will be shorten quicker than usual, also trying to compete with ASIC using mobile phones is a crazy idea.

How PoC Work?

PoC is a consensus where miners make use of their device storage to keep the pre-computed hashes prior to the mining process begun. Every miner need to allocate a desired amount of storage for mining, then the mining script will plot the hashes to the allocated space and also group the hashes into scoop.

Image credits to Burstcoin Whitepaper

Once the hashes have been plotted into the allocated space. miner connects to the Node to get mining work which contain the block producer signature, base target and next block height. The miner then determines which scoop to look for the hashes, then start scanning the hashes in the plot file to look for the correct nonce. At this time, there is no CPU involvement at all. The plot file reading speed and the number of hashes in the allocated storage space determine the mining success rate.

Every account generates a unique different set of hashes base on unique account ID and nonce value. And, the miner just need to pre-compute the hashes once and save into the storage, then these hashes can be reused multiple time even though there is a block being successfully mined.

The PoC concept is a bit different compare to the Bitcoin PoW consensus whereby the hash is generated base on the entire block data. However, in order to mine a PoC block, it is determined by finding the correct nonce within the target deadline. The Node check the last 30 blocks generation time to determine the next block target deadline in order to maintain average 5 minutes (24 blocks 4 minutes for Burstcoin) block produce time. The miner need to find the correct hash within the target deadline.

Why Not Cloud Mining?

The common question that asked by the people who have listened to our idea: Since mobile phone is unfeasible for mining, why not put it into cloud or server?

A blockchain are supposed to be meant for mining for everyone. The original intension of Satoshi Nakamoto, the founder of Bitcoin, created Bitcoin – a P2P payment system that govern and maintain by everyone, using the extra computing resource that you leave it idle. Our objective is to do the same, let everyone participates in mining, together maintain the blockchain network, while leaving your FiiiPOS terminal or mobile phone running idle and charging battery.

We do not need expensive ASIC machine to power the blockchain, wasting too much energy for little purpose. We emphasize reusability, your mobile phone is the FiiiCoin node, the more mobile phone from different individual come in as part of the FiiiCoin blockchain, the higher the security of our FiiiCoin.

FiiiCoin is specifically designed for ASIC proof, quantum computer proof, cloud mining proof, computer proof and also restricted to only FiiiPOS and mobile phones allow to participate in mining. Hence, the consensus – Delegate Proof of Capacity (DPoC) is formed.

PoW vs DPoC

Rule	PoW	DPoC
Finding hash	Real time	Periodic
Hash base	Entire Block	Device ID + Account ID + Nonce
Competition	First + Highest Difficulty	First + Lowest Target Deadline
Compute Power	CPU / GPU	CPU + Storage
Minable	Everyone	Restricted device only

Potential Exploit

Burstcoin being susceptible to time-memory trade-offs, thus allowing miners to mine using PoW and using just a small fraction of space to be at the same rate as “honest miners”. The Burst PoC2 should solve the problem and FiiiCoin is also prepared for the same potential exploit.

Secondly, in order to restrict certain device to be able to participate in mining is also a challenge since today’s virtual machine technology is mature, a PC can easily virtualize a few mobile phones to perform FiiiCoin mining.

The Balance of Security, Speed, Decentralization

Every blockchain technology always grasp between the balance of decentralization, security and performance. There is no one silver bullet or one size fit all solution that can achieve these 3 characteristics. When you want to improve the security of the blockchain, you either need to jeopardize the performance or decentralization.

FiiiCoin has been designed specifically for payment ecosystem, it is a less decentralized blockchain but with better security and performance. The FiiiPOS and mobile phone mining restriction is to protect our merchants and supporters interest. With delegated PoC consensus, we can achieve higher transaction per second by letting the Super Node keep generating block with no restriction, however, it is to be confirmed later when our technical team finish the development and testing in the test net.

The Super Node responsible in producing blocks, while the normal node (wallet) is responsible in validating the block and distribute the data across the blockchain network. All the miners who wish to connect to the Super Node, they have to either own a FiiiPOS terminal or paying monthly subscription fee to enable mining with a separate mining software.

Due to the concern of a mobile phone storage limitation, it is not encouraged to install full node into the mobile phone as the blockchain size is growing overtime. However, we provide a separate lightweight wallet that only sync block headers for mobile phone.

The Death of POS Terminal

POS Terminal manufacturers are facing very tough competition in the market. There are so many POS terminal that accept credit card payment or mobile payment choices available. Payment solution provider or banks are giving out POS terminal to their merchants for free. There is transaction fee competition as well. It is just a tool for the merchant to accept payment.

Today, in order to compete with the existing market, our POS terminal – FiiiPOS need to be capable of generating revenue for our merchants even there is no transaction at all, especially in the crypto industry where not many users adopt into it yet and also without government support. Furthermore, we are into transaction fee war as well, giving lower fee compare to the bank and other payment provider. The FiiiPOS machine cost can be ROI after a period of time.

With FiiiCoin DPoC design, merchant generate free FiiiCoin out from their idling and charging POS terminal. The FiiiCoin earning can be used to offset the transaction fee as well as the cost of the machine. The FiiiCoin value is maintained by everyone who uses FiiiCoin to make payment. We are forming an ecosystem that everyone does not dump FiiiCoin to exchange for fiat currency, instead making it usable anywhere around the world with large merchant network who own FiiiPOS terminal. This is something that the existing payment solution provider cannot provide at the moment.

Summary

I believe crypto enthusiast will condemn about our blockchain design for not being fully decentralized. I would like to emphasize our priority now is taking care of our merchants and attempting to build a large payment ecosystem. It is not easy to make everyone happy unless I sell ice-cream. There is no one size fit all solution. Our goal is to distribute FiiiPOS worldwide and making it available to everyone every where, travelers able to spend crypto overseas without the need to exchange foreign currency.

I believe a crypto which is usable and acceptable by people is only considered as successful. Cryptocurrency is not supposed to be a speculative investment tool. It should not be just a technology showcase as well. No matter how good is your blockchain technology, when there is no adoption, no application, it is considered meaningless and valueless.

I am open for any comment, feel free to drop me a message in the comment section below if you have a better idea in designing a blockchain for our business model.

The Security of FiiiPay & FiiiPOS

On June 5th and 6th, me and my marketing team colleagues attended the Singapore Smart Nation Innovation / Innovfest Unbound event, setting up booth and pitch to promote our FiiiPOS and FiiiPay. We received a lot very useful feedback and comment about our product. The most frequently asked question is related to security which I would like to explain more in this post.

HTTPS

Firstly, the most common way to secure a communication channel is to use encryption. Our POS terminal and digital wallet communicate with our payment gateway API using SSL. It is to prevent user data from being leaked when users or merchants are connecting their devices to a public WiFi. You do not know there may be someone who is also connecting to the same WiFi network implanted some sniffing script to the router to monitor the network traffic. If the communication is not encrypted, the hacker can see the data flow between your POS terminal or digital wallet.

Image via contextis.com

Therefore, we strongly encourage our merchant who is using our FiiiPOS terminal not to connect to a public free WiFi hotspot, but putting up a SIM card into the POS terminal to use own network instead.

DNSSEC

All our public domain are protected with Domain Name System Security Extension (DNSSEC). It is a mechanism to prevent hackers from hijacking the DNS and faking the response data to the user, which is known as man-in-the-middle attacks.

Image credit to Michael Earls

Firewall & DMZ

FiiiPay and FiiiPOS servers are secured with perimeter network (known as Demilitarized Zone - DMZ). All the servers are protected with firewall rules that locked down most of the network port access. The common default ports are being changed to random port to prevent hackers from using brute force attack to guess remote access password.

The web and API servers are separated from the database servers where by the public access servers sit in the DMZ but the database server sit in the trusted zone or local area network which restricted to be accessed by the dedicated servers and IP addresses only.

The Vault

With the firewall setup above, all our cryptocurrency nodes are being protected and the nodes access are being restricted. We call it the vault as it can only be accessed by the approved staffs. The servers password are changed frequently and it is strongly type password. The cryptocurrency private key are backed up regularly.

Full Disk Encryption

All the servers storage such as hard disks and solid state disks are all fully encrypted. The servers are setup in a remote data center managed by the service provider. The servers contain the very valuable cryptocurrency private keys. In order to prevent the system engineer in the data center access to the server disks, the disks are fully encrypted. So that, it could prevent the system engineer from trying to unplug the disk and put it into another server or computer to attempt to obtain the private key.

Mobile Application Digital Signature

All the FiiiPay and FiiiPOS application are digitally signed and published to the application store. FiiiPOS application can only be installed to the POS terminal. Hacker cannot install any malware, script, key logger or applet to the POS terminal physically or remotely. So the chances of Spectre and Meltdown exploit is very low and near impossible.

Two Factor Authentication (2FA)

FiiiPay & FiiiPOS provide optional feature for the users and merchants to enable which is the two factor authentication. By default, SMS authentication is enabled. When user or merchant attempt to withdraw cryptocurrency out from the digital wallet, they need to provide the OTP from the received SMS.

We also provide optional Google Authenticator and email authentication option for 2FA in order to reduce the risk of user crypto being stolen by the hacker who has cracked the user password and gained access to the user account.

Artificial Intelligent

FiiiFinance will be equipped with machine learning capability to review all the crypto withdrawal request submitted by the FiiiPay and FiiiPOS users. It collect all the withdrawal timestamp, IP address, geolocation, device ID, operating system, withdrawal amount, crypto type, etc data. Based on the user app usage behavior, pattern and the withdrawal request history, it can raise alert to the finance team and put the withdrawal transaction on hold for human review when it detect unusual activity for a particular account. This security measurement can ensure the lower risk of the crypto to be stolen by the hacker who has gained access to a FiiiPay/FiiiPOS user account.

Payment Code Algorithm

The QR code, Bluetooth and NFC payment mechanism actually rely on HMAC (hash-based message authentication code) to generate the unique OTP which is impossible forge and brute force attack. The generated payment code is always unique to different account at different time and it will be valid for a short period of time.

Summary

Our system architecture are setup in enterprise standard. Our customer digital asset and data are the utmost important, hence we are very serious and invest heavily on system and network security. Cyber security is always the hot topic in blockchain world as we occasionally read the news about X exchange platform had been hacked and lost X million of USD worth of cryptocurrency. We ensure this tragedy will not happen in our platform.

If you are a cyber security expert or ethical hacker, please drop me a message by connecting to me at LinkedIn. We are planning for a hackathon event for our product to look for security exploit.

iOS - AppStore
Android - PlayStore

If you are interested in our multi-cryptocurrency POS machine - FiiiPOS, please drop me an email at sylvester.lee@fiiipay.com

If you are interested in our project, please visit our website at https://fiii.io

Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/fiiipay/
Telegram - https://t.me/fiiicoin