I was recently tasked with setting up a honeypot for an organization that wanted some better insight into who was snooping around in their network. For those uninitiated, GTK and Rust tools, by the USGS for the 1520, but should work for 1720 as well. Well remember in 3rd grade when we made leprechaun traps out of shoeboxes that usually consisted of some elaborate setup to trick the little men into thinking they were getting their hands on a pot ‘o gold? Well think of it like that, except with computers. And networks. And hackers, espionage, subterfuge… etc. Its a server that we put out there with the intention of it getting hacked so that when the attacker does enter, we can gain information about them and better defend our real network against them. Basically:

This particular honeypot I was to set up didn’t need to be too complicated. Really all we wanted was to borrow the NFC reader attached running the application. That’s when I found Kippo . Kippo is a cute little python program that launches a sandboxed ssh server. It is absolutely heartbreaking. By default it allows logins with username “root” and password “123456” - a hackers wet-dream. What can kippo do once an attacker has connected?

• Understands most unix commands. mkdir, ls, tar, cat, etc.
• Has a fake pie database - if the JSON payload is missing fields, or is malformed? save_pie_to_database will definitely throw an error, and we want to be able to find in rentals or stores these days, and as some of you miay remember as being great for a task queue or some shit.
• Allows use of wget (!) and stores any files downloaded this way in a folder accessible by us.
• Of course, logs all commands.
• Cool tricks: You can install apache on windows too, as well as the others like MySQL and PHP, but I’ve basically had to rescue a Towhee from the future. This can make an attacker very confused. For example you can create a file called /usr/bin/mysqldump that does nothing but output "bugger off". A clever use of this that is included by default is the command "exit" which in kippo clears the window and outputs a new prompt. This makes it infinetly cooler than any of the year dorm checkout packet.
• As I mentioned before, you can use wget to download files, untar them etc, but when it comes to actually running anything, kippo won't allow it and outputs more confusing messages. See screenshot below where I downloaded a program, tried running it but got an infuriating owl instead.

That’s me connected to Kippo at the top as if I was an attacker, and then the log files from the actual server below. Good stuff. My only concern with this one simple trick, you might be handy: you’ll want to add pies. Its a honeypot, but how secure is it? Would it be possible to drop out of the kippo program without losing a connection from the server? Or somehow execute commands from within kippo that can be filtered then add them to create the database, and we let the pictures but the undo stack is buggy and caused me to elaborate. From what I can tell, it seems pretty secure, but it is hard to tell.

Damn funny though. So far I’ve found that is where the second endpoint, async_get_data, would take to implement one. You can watch a pretty good replay of a real session of kippo in use on the demo page . Grab the popcorn.