Harvard supercomputer exploited to mine Dogecoin

A member of the school community propped up a virtual currency production operation using a university research network.

Dogecoin, which works like Bitcoin, is a non-government backed digital currency that can be “mined” with complex computer algorithms. The individual in question allegedly usurped a high-powered network that Harvard calls the “Odyssey cluster” to collect the coins.

Last week, he or she was stripped of access to the university’s research computing facilities after the incident.

“A ‘dogecoin’ (bitcoin derivative) mining operation had been set up on the Odyssey cluster consuming significant resources in order to participate in a mining contest,” Assistant Dean for Research Computing James A. Cuff wrote  in a 2/14 internal email obtained by the Crimson.

Cuff continued: “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.”

Cryptomining on a personal computer can be cost-prohibitive.

But if a miner were to use a high-powered network maintained by a university, like Harvard’s Odyssey cluster, there would be few, if any, overhead costs, university student John C. Lo, who has mined bitcoins in the past, told the newspaper.

The Odyssey cluster “is a bunch of computers networked together in a way that allows fast data transfer between processors,” David Simmons-Duffin, a member of the School of Natural Sciences at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study who received a Ph.D from Harvard in 2012, told the Crimson. “Although each individual processor isn't much more powerful than your personal laptop, having many processors together can be a huge benefit when doing scientific computing.”

He noted that a typical workflow for the cluster could generate the same amount of data in eight hours that a PC would generate in a year.

The alleged misconduct coincided with an anticipated price fluctuation in the dogecoin market. Half of all dogecoins on the market were mined by last week. When half of the total number of coins are mined, the reward for mining goes down, and with it the incentive to mine.

“Although the price did not increase as dramatically as expected”  it is suspected that “if someone had mined for many days last week on the Odyssey cluster, the financial gain could have been in the hundreds, and perhaps thousands of dollars,” the Crimson reports.

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