What is Helium Hotspot Spoofing & How to Identify?

To protect your helium mining rewards with Bobcat Miner 300, this post will assist you in recognizing Helium Hotspot Spoofing.

Since the inception of the Helium network, there have been problems with miners spoofing or fabricating their locations. In other words there are people who are gaming the system for more rewards.

What does spoofing mean and how do people fake their locations? Let’s find out.

Helium Hotspot Spoofing

The Helium app allows you to assert your location. Your phone’s GPS is actually used to pinpoint your location.
You can, however, override this setting and manually enter your location.

A spoofer will ‘place’ miners at a remote location where there are no other miners other than their own. As a result, the miners only converse with one another. So while the miners can actually be physically located in China (for instance) they appear to be in Belgium. Here is an illustration of that.

Someone noticed that all the RSSI and SNR readings were a little bit too accurate, which raised serious suspicions about this hotspot. Typically these measurements vary by quite a bit on account of radio frequency propagation in the real world. It differs from transmitting signals across a cable. The presence of constant RSSI and SNR readings indicates that the signals are not being transmitted over the air but rather through a cable that connects the transmitter and the receiver. With this miner, that was most likely the situation.

Fortunately, Helium has recently started upkeep of a denylist. You can report hotspots like the one mentioned above when you see them. All of the other legitimate users who are working hard to ensure they have the ideal setup and antenna placement for maximum rewards are being negatively impacted by helium hotpot spoofing. After that, Helium’s staff will investigate the hotspot that has been reported. This was carried out in the case of Tricky Lava Lemur, but it is currently producing nothing.

We strongly advise you to report any miners you believe to be spoofed using the Helium denylist. Before banning a miner, a person actually investigates these.

What is the Denylist?​

The Denylist consists of a list of Hotspot public keys and a cryptographic signature that have been found to be undermining the Network’s integrity in some way or another in order to obtain Rewards. Network integrity is weakened even when only a small portion of users engage in dishonest gaming.

Examples include, but are not limited to: Cluster Packet Forwarders, Misasserted Locations, Misasserted Antennas, Multiple or Shared Antennas, Attenuators, Amplifiers and Data Credit Farming

In order to prevent HNT Rewards from going to dishonest Hotspots while keeping track of the denied transactions on the chain, Helium Network Validators have an optional subscription to the Denylist. The Denylist is one more tool among many available to encourage Hotspots to offer the most truthful and accurate wireless coverage possible on the Network.

To keep the Network decentralized, the Denylist is compiled by the local community. No one organization can have complete control over the Network thanks to credible decentralization. Any coordinated effort to manipulate incentives, obstruct data transfer, or censor information to favor one party at the expense of another undercuts our goal of building open, worldwide wireless networks.

How “gaming” is defined is left to Operators on denylists, members of the Helium Community, and, in the end, Validators’ decision to include.

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Is There Any Easy Way to Determine If a Miner is Legit?

Yes, as of now, there are some clear signs, although the best way to determine is to do a site inspection and do a signal scan of the area. The quick and dirty method is to use the Helium Coverage Map. These hackers can currently be easily identified on a map by someone with experience. Oftentimes, these hackers place the miners in an evenly spaced way that is apparent. Before showing a Hacking Network, I want to show you what a legitimate mining network looks like:

Here is a screenshot I took from mappers.helium.com. In order to vouch for their legitimacy, I personally checked the wireless coverage of these miners over the previous few days.

How does a good idea spread, if you think about it? You know how it works: someone buys a miner, tells his neighbor next door, and they each buy one. He then tells his brother, who lives across the street in the neighborhood, what has happened.. So you get this organic growth that isn’t perfectly separated…. However, these hacking networks don’t appear that way.

Example of a POC Hacking Network

The majority of hacking networks currently have these features, but I do believe that will change as more people become aware of their strategies and they adapt their techniques.

Look at how evenly spaced apart the dots are. That’s not how Miner placement works out. It’s too perfect. Another dead giveaway is the witnesses:

Witnesses are the colored links who vet the purple miner who sent out the beacon to assert it’s location. In the real world, this rarely takes place. Observe how distinct it is from a picture of miners in the real world.

Now, unless I had concrete evidence, I wouldn’t just publicly accuse a Miner Network of cheating. I had serious doubts about this network before I even started writing this article. It would have been too far of a drive, but I was really tempted to go check to see if this network was real or if I was just being paranoid. I was fortunate enough to have a job that required me to drive through this area, so I went and wirelessly sniffed this network with a wireless mapper. After crawling for hours, I didn’t get one ping, and I climbed over each and every one of those miners. Here are their names:

• Wide Graphite Orca
• Bubbly Slate Crane
• Blurry Linen Reindeer
• Fierce Mulberry Osprey
• Able Sky Pangolin
• Shiny Peach Swallow
• Long Chartreuse Panda

Unfortunately, there are a lot more miners than the ones mentioned above who steal HNT worth thousands of HNT (or about 1.3 USD) from honest users.

Unfortunately, the only reliable method to determine whether hacking has occurred is Wireless Mapping the Helium Network, which is a time-consuming, expensive, and tedious process. I seriously believe that quite a few additional Miners may be hacking, but I haven’t had time to investigate. If someone in the Georgia region could crawl Gainesville and Augusta to see if these are hackers or not, that would be AMAZING. Just look at the map:

That is simply too ideal. This is a fake, and I’m prepared to wager money on it. If my suspicion is correct, this specific network is robbing hundreds of HNT coins every month.

Summary

The Helium Network faces an uphill battle. Because of strict regulations and impenetrable encryption algorithms, Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have the good fortune to reside in a digital fortress. In order to fulfill its promise, helium must operate in the frequently chaotic analog world. And that, I suppose, really gets to the fundamental query: Can people create a trustworthy system that is built on top of the chaotic real world? I suppose we’ll soon find out.

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