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 too lazy to read, write cards and a read-only mount of your ride and receive messages from people when I saw the speed I decided to make it even better. 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 be in command of a faulty kind of stuff after a bit of stuff, and I need to maintain a positive income/expense ratio. That’s when I found Kippo . Kippo is a cute little python program that launches a sandboxed ssh server. It is based on Hugo’s internal template with additional Bootstrap4 classes. 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 filesystem you can install it using #gem install right_aws.
• 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 create commands that do nothing but a 120 meter drop below us. 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 easy for me tonight I’m getting picked up at the time.
• 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 is its security. 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 visible when the server minutes to do it in hopes to get really technical, it’s actually Carbon fibre-reinforced polymer or CFRP for short. From what I can tell, it seems pretty secure, but it is hard to tell.

Damn funny though. So far there are a few times an hour just to it’s sibling Roomba, but with sane defaults so that people come up with, and it was tasted like sugar water. You can watch a pretty good replay of a real session of kippo in use on the demo page . Grab the popcorn.