Next week we will present a new paper at USENIX WOOT 2018, in which we show that we can find low- and medium-interaction honeypots on the Internet with a few packets. So if you are running such a honeypot (Cowrie, Glastopf, Conpot etc.), then “we know where you live” and the bad guys might soon as well.

In total, we identify 7,605 honeypot instances across nine different honeypot implementations for the most important network protocols SSH, Telnet, and HTTP.

These honeypots rely on standard libraries to implement large parts of the transport layer, but they were never intended to provide identical behaviour to the systems being impersonated. We show that fixing the identity string pretending to be OpenSSH or Apache and not “any” library or fixing other common identifiers such as error messages is not enough. The problem is that there are literally thousands of distinguishing protocol interactions, part of the contribution of the paper is to show how to pick the “best” one. Even worse, to fingerprint these honeypots, we do not need to send any credentials so it will be hard to tell from the logging that you have been detected.

We also find that many honeypots are deployed and forgotten about because part of the fingerprinting has been to determine how many people are not actively patching their systems! We find that  27% of the SSH honeypots have not been updated within the last 31 months and only 39% incorporate improvements from 7 months ago. It turns out that security professionals are as bad as anyone.

We argue that our method is a  ‘class break’ in that trivial patches cannot address the issue. Thus we need to move on from the current dominant honeypot architecture of python libraries and python programs for low- and medium-interaction honeypots. We also have developed a modified version of the OpenSSH daemon (sshd) which can front-end a Cowrie instance so that the protocol layer distinguishers will no longer work.

The paper is available here.