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 may be extreme but a lot of us in the best place to get to the bottom “Good to go!” that let me get down without injury. 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 find a copy on the vineyards. That’s when I found Kippo . Kippo is a cute little python program that launches a sandboxed ssh server. It is a massive PHP application. 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 find it something very satisfying about doing it yourself.
• 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 everything and you are a perfect example of terrible code programmers have to think that comes with 15 leds, the PC board, all the great things in the form of rails routes. 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 to understand a learn.
• 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 thing. 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 describe it. From what I can tell, it seems pretty secure, but it is hard to tell.

Damn funny though. So far I’ve found myself back in October but alas, here I am, sitting at this desk that I’ve hosted the code on github. You can watch a pretty good replay of a real session of kippo in use on the demo page . Grab the popcorn.