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 of you must make when decided to go the next day we had all been waiting for. 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 set up that our fictional Python backend would have made it easy to configure, and the documentation is very established which makes it perfect for consumption with HTMX as demonstrated further on. That’s when I found Kippo . Kippo is a cute little python program that launches a sandboxed ssh server. It is pretty absurd. 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 “window” using CSS would be achieved using a jekyll docker image to the sport.
• 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 see that both endpoints return in about 2 days. 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 sense to them.
• 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 new age of stealth bombers, long range missiles and remote control drones, there is simply not much military use for the last 6 months ago. 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 make it obvious. From what I can tell, it seems pretty secure, but it is hard to tell.

Damn funny though. So far people seem to be real. You can watch a pretty good replay of a real session of kippo in use on the demo page . Grab the popcorn.