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For recent information visit: www.honeyd.org
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.
It is possible to ping the virtual machines, or to traceroute them.
Any type of service on the virtual machine can be simulated according
to a simple configuration file. Instead of simulating a service, it
is also possible to proxy it to another machine.
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annotate "AIX 4.0 - 4.2" fragment old
# Example of a simple host template and its binding
create template
set template personality "AIX 4.0 - 4.2"
add template tcp port 80 "sh scripts/web.sh"
add template tcp port 22 "sh scripts/test.sh $ipsrc $dport"
add template tcp port 23 proxy 10.23.1.2:23
set template default tcp action reset
bind 10.21.19.102 template
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The different TCP personalities are learned from reading a nmap
fingerprint file. The configured personality is the operating system
that nmap or xprobe will return. Personalities can be annotated to
determine if they allow FIN-scans for open ports or to select the
preference in which they reassemble fragmented IP packets.
Honeyd can be used to create a virtual honey net or for general
network monitoring. It supports the creation of a virtual network
topology including dedicated routes and routers. The routes can
be attributed with latency and packet loss to make the topology
seem more realistic.
Because Honeyd interacts with potentially malicious adversaries, you
should sandbox it with Systrace. Systrace
prevents an adversary from exploiting bugs in your Honeyd scripts.
Subsystem Virtualization
Honeyd supports service virtualization by executing Unix applications
as subsystems running in the virtual IP address space of a configured
honeypot. This allows any network application to dynamically bind
ports, create TCP and UDP connections using a virtual IP address.
Subsystems are virtualized by intercepting their network requests
and redirecting them to Honeyd. Every configuration template may
contain subsystems that are started as separated processes when
the template is bound to a virtual IP address. An additional
benefit of this approach is the ability of honeypots to create
sporadic background traffic like requesting web pages and reading
email, etc.
Network Simulation/Internet-In-The-Box
Honeyd supports assymetric routes and the integration of physical
machines into the virtual network topology. As a result, it is
possible to use Honeyd for simple network simulations: Physical
hosts can be exposed to high latency or packet loss, arbitrary
routing infrastructures, etc.
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route entry 10.0.0.1 network 10.0.0.0/8
route 10.0.0.1 link 10.0.0.0/24
route 10.0.0.1 add net 10.4.0.0/14 tunnel "thishost" "honeyd-b"
route 10.0.0.1 add net 10.1.0.0/16 10.1.0.1 latency 55ms loss 0.1
route 10.0.0.1 add net 10.2.0.0/16 10.2.0.1 latency 20ms loss 0.1
route 10.0.0.1 add net 10.3.0.0/16 10.2.0.1 latency 20ms loss 0.1
route 10.1.0.1 link 10.1.0.0/24
route 10.2.0.1 link 10.2.0.0/24
[...]
route 10.2.0.1 add net 10.3.0.0/16 10.3.0.1 latency 10ms loss 0.1
route 10.3.0.1 link 10.3.0.0/24
route 10.3.0.1 add net 10.3.1.1/24 10.3.1.1 latency 10ms
route 10.3.0.1 add net 10.3.240.0/20 10.3.240.1 latency 5ms
route 10.3.1.1 link 10.3.1.1/24
route 10.3.240.1 link 10.3.240.0/20
route 10.3.240.1 add net 0.0.0.0/0 10.3.0.1 latency 40ms loss 0.5
[...]
bind 10.2.0.243 to fxp0
bind 10.3.1.15 to fxp0
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Using GRE tunneling allows the creation of distributed
setups that allow Honeyd to scale to larger networks. It also allows
virtual machines to be spread across separate address spaces as GRE
tunnel selection can be based on the source addresses.
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Features
- Simulates thousands of virtual hosts at the same time.
- Configuration of arbitrary services via simple configuration file:
- Includes proxy connects.
- Passive fingerprinting to identify remote hosts.
- Random sampling for load scaling.
- Simulates operating systems at TCP/IP stack level:
- Fools nmap and xprobe,
- Adjustable fragment reassembly policy,
- Adjustable FIN-scan policy.
- Simulation of arbitrary routing topologies:
- Configurable latency and packet loss.
- Assymetric routing.
- Integration of physical machines into topology.
- Distributed Honeyd via GRE tunneling.
- Subsystem virtualization:
- Run real UNIX applications under virtual Honeyd IP addresses: web servers, ftp servers, etc...
- Dynamic port binding in virtual address space, background initiation of network connections, etc.
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Future Work
- In the near future, Honeyd and Arpd are going to be integrated into the
Monkey MasterBaiter toolkit.
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A sneak pre-view on future features can be found on the
Honeyd development page.
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Contributions
- If you have implemented your own services, please send them to me
and I will put them on the
contributions page.
- If you are using Honeyd for something cool, please
drop me an email and let me know if you would like to be listed on
a Honeyd users web page.
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Source code
Honeyd is released under the
GNU General Public License (GPL).
Honeyd should compile and run on *BSD systems, GNU/Linux and Solaris.
Please check the FAQ
before sending questions via email.
You might need other tools like arpd or proxy arp to get honeyd
working for you.
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Dependencies
In order to compile honeyd, you need the following libraries:
- libevent - an asynchronous event library.
- libdnet - the [not
so] dumb network library.
- libpcap - a packet capture library.
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References
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Links
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Honeyd in the Press
- Honeyd, MISC, July 2003.
- Honey-Techniken zur Einburchsvorsorge, iX - Magazin für Professionelle Informationstechnik, June 2003.
- Strategies & Issues: Honeypots - Sticking It to Hackers -
Lance Spitzner, Network Magazine, April 2003.
- Open Source Honeypots, Part Two: Deploying Honeyd in the Wild - Lance Spitzer,
SecurityFocus, March 2003.
- Bait and Switch with Honeyd - Marcus Ranum on Honeyd,
Information Scurity, February 2003.
- Open Source Honeypots: Learning with Honeyd - Lance Spitzner on Honeyd,
SecurityFocus, January 2003.
Acknowledgments
Arpd is work done mostly by Dug Song and some beautification by me.
Without Dug Song's libdnet
this work would have been much much harder. I would also like to
thank Bill Cheswick, Derek Cotton, Marius Eriksen, Christopher Kolina,
Christian Kreibich, Yuqing Mai, Jamie Van Randwyk, Dug Song, Lance
Spitzner and Eric Thomas for helpful suggestions, ideas and code
contribution, George Akimov, Peter Balland and Christian Kreibich for
finding bugs.
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