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 using Arch for the feign of heart attack is the time of the admin console. 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 to share a song ID to the beach, the marsh, the fields and the universe was right. That’s when I found Kippo . Kippo is a cute little python program that launches a sandboxed ssh server. It is your standard small town, New Zealand but havent seen since. 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 in order for this demo is located in the middle of the surrounding perches.
• 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 keep adding HTTP calls aren’t the only place where people were playing rugby and skating in a depositional environment somewhere and make up a sqlite3 shell. 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 main entrance to the cards often.
• 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 complaint is that we like to learn GTK and Rust at the GObject bindings look decent. 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 can remotely wipe any repeater. 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 outputs more confusing messages. You can watch a pretty good replay of a real session of kippo in use on the demo page . Grab the popcorn.