I was recently asked about the network configuration I use for my honeyd sensor. As I now have a pretty(ish) network diagram showing my setup as a result, decided sharing is caring.
Category archives: honeyd
Mercury – Live Honeypot DVD
Mercury Live DVD was initially (I believe) announced in a post to the Nepenthes Mailing list. It is a remastered Ubuntu distribution with pre-installed honeypot applications and malware analysis tools created by John Moore.
Determining connection source from honeyd.log – cymruwhois version
InfoSanity’s honeyd-geoip.py script has been useful for analysing the initial findings from a HoneyD installation, but one of weaknesses identified in the geolocation database used by the script was that a large proportion of the source IP addresses connecting to the honeypot environment weren’t none within the database. Markus pointed me in the direction of the cymruwhois (discussed previously)python module as an alternative. I’ve re-written the initial script.
Honeydsum: HoneyD log analyser
Honeydsum is a script created by Lucio Henrique Franco and Carlos Henrique Peixoto Caetano Chaves for the Brazilian Honeynet project. As described by it’s Authors, it is a tool written in Perl designed to generate a text summary from Honeyd logs.
Determining connection source from honeyd.log
After getting a working HoneyD environment I wanted to better dig into the information provided by the system. First up was a quick script to get a feel for where the attacks/connections originate from. At first glance I really like the log format that is used by honeyd.log, it is nice an easy to parse. From this I quickly knocked up a python script to parse the honeyd.log file, collect a list of unique source addresses and finally use GeoIP to determine (and count) the county of origin.
Basic HoneyD configuration
After first getting HoneyD up and running previously for a proof of concept I’ve begun a wider implementation of HoneyD to function as the backbone for an upgraded research environment.
HoneyD’s key strength is it’s flexibility, HoneyD’s website contains some sample configuration files that show HoneyD emulating multiple systems running different OSes and applications, a large multi-site network and even a config file to create a honeypot environment for a wireless network. I’ve found these samples immensely useful references for developing custom templates for my own implementation.
Starting with HoneyD
Since reading Virtual Honeypots I’ve been wanting to implement a HoneyD system, developed by Niels Provos. From it’s own site, HoneyD is a small daemon that creates virtual hosts on a network. The hosts can be configured to run arbitrary services, and their personality can be adapted so that they appear to be running certain operating systems. Honeyd enables a single host to claim multiple addresses – I have tested up to 65536 – on a LAN for network simulation. Honeyd improves cyber security by providing mechanisms for threat detection and assessment. It also deters adversaries by hiding real systems in the middle of virtual systems.
Book Review: Virtual Honeypots
It took longer than I had wanted, but I have just finished reading through Virtual Honeypots: From Botnet Tracking to Intrusion Detection. The book is written by Niels Provos, creator of HoneyD (among other things) and Thorsten Holz. Given the authors I had high expectation when the delivery came through, thankfully it didn’t disappoint.