Honeypots Margaret Asami
What are honeypots ? an intrusion detection mechanism entices intruders to attack and eventually take over the system, while their moves are being monitored without them knowing 2 types: production research
How do honeypots address security ? prevention can’t prevent bad guys ! detection leverages traditional IDS - no false positives nor false negatives reaction provides incident response team un- polluted data & stoppable system
Values & Risks + simple to build + high signal/noise ratio - playing with fire
How to build a honeypot ? how do we attract intruders ? choose enticing names (e.g., mail.sjsu.edu) how do we know we’re probed ? put honeypot on isolated net behind a firewall set firewall to log all traffic how do we protect our peers ? set firewall to allow all in-coming traffic, but limit out-going traffic ICMP, FTP, DNS are common protocols intruders need
How to build a honeypot (cont…) how do we track intruder’s moves ? layer 1: firewall logs layer 2: syslogd hack layer 3: sniffer layer 4: tripwire layer 5: kernel/shell hack each layer lets us learn different things multiple layers spread the risk of compromised data
How to build a honeypot ? (cont…) how do we kick them out ? shut-down, take honeypot off-line, remove backdoors, fix vulnerabilities, then put it back on-line how do we make them not know ? by avoiding frequent & substantial changes to honeypot
Popular honeypots Backofficer Friendly (BOF) low level of interaction emulates basic services fakes replies Honeyd mid-high level of interaction emulates >400 OSs & services use ARP spoofing to assume victim IP addr
Popular honeypots (cont…) Honeynets high level of interaction network of real systems, zero emulation used mostly in research
Win98 honeypot 524 unique NetBIOS scans UDP port 137 (NetBIOS Naming Service) UDP port 139 (NetBIOS Session Service) we are not advertized, so why ? default Win98 installation enbale sharing of C:\ drive connect to internet & wait
Win98 honeypot (cont…) intruder copies distributed.net client config file to our honeypot
Win98 honeypot (cont…) actual config file transfer reveals intruder’s identity
Win98 honeypot (cont…) transfer the distributed.net client file transfer the worm itself
Win98 honeypot (cont…) next, a crafted c:\windows\win.ini file is uploaded [windows] load=c:\windows\system\msi216.exe infection completes !! next time honeypot reboots: distributed.net client will be run worm will scan and replicate itself worm will add “bymer.scanner” to registry
Conclusion a tool, not a solution level of interaction vs risk