SSH Honeypot: Building, Deploying and Analysis

This article is set to discuss the various techniques that can be used while developing a honeypot, of any form, while considering the advantages and disadvantages of these very different methods. The foremost aims are to cover the principles of the Secure Shell (SSH), how it can be useful and more importantly, how attackers can gain access to a system by using it. The article involved the development of multiple low interaction honeypots. The low interaction honeypots that have been developed make use of the highly documented libssh and even editing the source code of an already available SSH daemon. Finally the aim is to combine the results with the vastly distributed Kippo honeypot, in order to be able to compare and contrast the results along with usability and necessity of particular features. Providing a clean and simple description for less knowledgeable users to be able to create and deploy a honeypot of production quality, adding security advantages to their network instantaneously

Dynamic Honeypot Configuration for Programmable Logic Controller Emulation

Attacks on industrial control systems and critical infrastructure are on the rise. Important systems and devices like programmable logic controllers are at risk due to outdated technology and ad hoc security measures. To mitigate the threat, honeypots are deployed to gather data on malicious intrusions and exploitation techniques. While virtual honeypots mitigate the unreasonable cost of hardware-replicated honeypots, these systems often suffer from a lack of authenticity due to proprietary hardware and network protocols. In addition, virtual honeynets utilizing a proxy to a live device suffer from performance bottlenecks and limited scalability. This research develops an enhanced, application layer emulator capable of alleviating honeynet scalability and honeypot inauthenticity limitations. The proposed emulator combines protocol-agnostic replay with dynamic updating via a proxy. The result is a software tool which can be readily integrated into existing honeypot frameworks for improved performance. The proposed emulator is evaluated on traffic reduction on the back-end proxy device, application layer task accuracy, and byte-level traffic accuracy. Experiments show the emulator is able to successfully reduce the load on the proxy device by up to 98% for some protocols. The emulator also provides equal or greater accuracy over a design which does not use a proxy. At the byte level, traffic variation is statistically equivalent while task success rates increase by 14% to 90% depending on the protocol. Finally, of the proposed proxy synchronization algorithms, templock and its minimal variant are found to provide the best overall performance

Automatic Configuration of Programmable Logic Controller Emulators

Programmable logic controllers (PLCs), which are used to control much of the world\u27s critical infrastructures, are highly vulnerable and exposed to the Internet. Many efforts have been undertaken to develop decoys, or honeypots, of these devices in order to characterize, attribute, or prevent attacks against Industrial Control Systems (ICS) networks. Unfortunately, since ICS devices typically are proprietary and unique, one emulation solution for a particular vendor\u27s model will not likely work on other devices. Many previous efforts have manually developed ICS honeypots, but it is a very time intensive process. Thus, a scalable solution is needed in order to automatically configure PLC emulators. The ScriptGenE Framework presented in this thesis leverages several techniques used in reverse engineering protocols in order to automatically configure PLC emulators using network traces. The accuracy, flexibility, and efficiency of the ScriptGenE Framework is tested in three fully automated experiments

T.: Towards automatic learning of valid services for honeypots

Abstract. Honeypots have emerged as an important tool in the field of Intrusion Detection Systems. Honeypots are decoy machines whose sole purpose is to be compromised by network attackers, in order to gain information about the attack techniques. The biggest challenge in deploying honeypots is their configuration and maintenance compounded with the fact that they either emulate a few services or provide the real services. The emulated services, which are usually implemented using scripts, are restricted by the responses given to the attacker. This limits the amount of information that can be gathered. The scripts are also much easier to be detected by the attacker. On the other hand, the drawback of providing real services is the greater risk associated with their use. In this paper, we describe service-mining, a machine learning approach to learn and emulate behavior of real-world services. Given large enough traces of the realservice interactions and some basic information about the service, we propose a scheme whereby we can learn the semantics of its various commands and then effectively emulate the service. This service may then be deployed on a honeypot to capture attack signatures without posing a threat to the complete network. Our initial experience in trying to emulate the popular FTP service is promising. We are able to learn the FTP service and then intelligently and consistently respond to user queries with our emulated FTP service