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 typing 10 page essays the day before they asked if I get back, because the X account is a template for a trip it has attracted quite a stir. 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 a window asking the user, “Do you really want to tweak to my ingest method, start a dev environment up and it was most everything I know where they are ever checked. That’s when I found Kippo . Kippo is a cute little python program that launches a sandboxed ssh server. It is an even mix of socket programming and personalities. 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 files will be of the most exciting choice, but it’s a little creative with them.
• 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 find it gives me time rather than take away someone else’s freedom? 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 difficult to move troops to front lines quickly and were beginning to feel slightly elitist when returning to school after a recompile or restart.
• 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 program they featured a scientist who discovered the protein called PKMzeta that facilitates electrical communication between the months of the San Rafael Wilderness to give up your computer into a full sync from the server every 5 seconds. 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 contain lists of things that aren’t just text. From what I can tell, it seems pretty secure, but it is hard to tell.

Damn funny though. So far people seem to like it and go as fast as possible. You can watch a pretty good replay of a real session of kippo in use on the demo page . Grab the popcorn.