Virtual Honeypots: From Botnet Tracking to Intrusion Detection
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Praise for Virtual Honeypots
"A power-packed resource of technical, insightful information that unveils
the world of honeypots in front of the reader's eyes."
-- Lenny Zeltser, Information Security Practice Leader at Gemini Systems
"This is one of the must-read security books of the year."
-- Cyrus Peikari, CEO, Airscanner Mobile Security, author, security warrior
"This book clearly ranks as one of the most authoritative in the field
of honeypots. It is comprehensive and well written. The authors provide
us with an insider's look at virtual honeypots and even help us in setting
up and understanding an otherwise very complex technology."
-- Stefan Kelm, Secorvo Security Consulting
"Virtual Honeypots is the best reference for honeypots today. Security
experts Niels Provos and Thorsten Holz cover a large breadth of cutting-edge
topics, from low-interaction honeypots to botnets and malware. If you want
to learn about the latest types of honeypots, how they work, and what they
can do for you, this is the resource you need."
-- Lance Spitzner, Founder, Honeynet Project
"Whether gathering intelligence for research and defense, quarantining
malware outbreaks within the enterprise, or tending hacker ant farms at
home for fun, you'll find many practical techniques in the black art of
deception detailed in this book. Honeypot magic revealed!"
-- Doug Song, Chief Security Architect, Arbor Networks
"Seeking the safest paths through the unknown sunny islands called honeypots?
Trying to avoid greedy pirates catching treasures deeper and deeper beyond
your ports? With this book, any reader will definitely get the right map
to handle current cyber-threats.
Designed by two famous white hats, Niels Provos and Thorsten Holz, it
carefully teaches everything from the concepts to practical real-life examples
with virtual honeypots. The main strength of this book relies in how it
covers so many uses of honeypots: improving intrusion detection systems,
slowing down and following incoming attackers, catching and analyzing 0-days
or malwares or botnets, and so on.
Sailing the high seas of our cyber-society or surfing the Net, from students
to experts, it's a must-read for people really aware of computer security,
who would like to fight against black-hats flags with advanced modern tools
like honeypots."
-- Laurent Oudot, Computer Security Expert, CEA
"Provos and Holz have written the book that the bad guys don't want you to
read. This detailed and comprehensive look at honeypots provides step-by-step
instructions on tripping up attackers and learning their tricks while lulling
them into a false sense of security. Whether you are a practitioner, an educator,
or a student, this book has a tremendous amount to offer. The underlying theory
of honeypots is covered, but the majority of the text is a "how-to" guide on
setting up honeypots, configuring them, and getting the most out of these traps,
while keeping actual systems safe. Not since the invention of the firewall has
a tool as useful as this provided security specialists with an edge in the never-ending
arms race to secure computer systems. Virtual Honeypots is a must-read and belongs
on the bookshelf of anyone who is serious about security."
-- Aviel D. Rubin, Ph.D., Computer Science Professor and Technical Director
of the Information Security Institute at Johns Hopkins University, and President
and Founder, Independent Security Evaluators
"An awesome coverage of modern honeypot technologies, both conceptual
and practical."
-- Anton Chuvakin
"Honeypots have grown from simple geek tools to key components in research
and threat monitoring at major entreprises and security vendors. Thorsten
and Niels comprehensive coverage of tools and techniques takes you behind
the scene with real-world examples of deployment, data acquisition, and
analysis."
-- Nicolas Fischbach, Senior Manager, Network Engineering Security, COLT Telecom,
and Founder of Securite.Org
Honeypots have demonstrated immense value in Internet security, but physical
honeypot deployment can be prohibitively complex, time-consuming, and expensive.
Now, there's a breakthrough solution. Virtual honeypots share many attributes
of traditional honeypots, but you can run thousands of them on a single
system-making them easier and cheaper to build, deploy, and maintain.
In this hands-on, highly accessible book, two leading honeypot pioneers
systematically introduce virtual honeypot technology. One step at a time,
you'll learn exactly how to implement, configure, use, and maintain virtual
honeypots in your own environment, even if you've never deployed a honeypot
before.
You'll learn through examples, including Honeyd, the acclaimed virtual
honeypot created by coauthor Niels Provos. The authors also present multiple
real-world applications for virtual honeypots, including network decoy,
worm detection, spam prevention, and network simulation.
After reading this book, you will be able to
- Compare high-interaction honeypots that provide real systems and services
and the low-interaction honeypots that emulate them
- Install and configure Honeyd to simulate multiple operating systems,
services, and network environments
- Use virtual honeypots to capture worms, bots, and other malware
- Create high-performance "hybrid" honeypots that draw on technologies
from both low- and high-interaction honeypots
- Implement client honeypots that actively seek out dangerous Internet
locations
- Understand how attackers identify and circumvent honeypots
- Analyze the botnets your honeypot identifies, and the malware it captures
- Preview the future evolution of both virtual and physical honeypots
Table of Contents
Preface xiii
Acknowledgments xxi
About the Authors xxiii
Chapter 1 Honeypot and Networking Background 1
1.1 Brief TCP/IP Introduction 1
1.2 Honeypot Background 7
1.3 Tools of the Trade 13
Chapter 2 High-Interaction Honeypots 19
2.1 Advantages and Disadvantages 20
2.2 VMware 22
2.3 User-Mode Linux 41
2.4 Argos 52
2.5 Safeguarding Your Honeypots 62
2.6 Summary 69
Chapter 3 Low-Interaction Honeypots 71
3.1 Advantages and Disadvantages 72
3.2 Deception Toolkit 73
3.3 LaBrea 74
3.4 Tiny Honeypot 81
3.5 GHH -- Google Hack Honeypot 87
3.6 PHP.HoP -- A Web-Based Deception Framework 94
3.7 Securing Your Low-Interaction Honeypots 98
3.8 Summary 103
Chapter 4 Honeyd -- The Basics 105
4.1 Overview 106
4.2 Design Overview 109
4.3 Receiving Network Data 112
4.4 Runtime Flags 114
4.5 Configuration 115
4.6 Experiments with Honeyd 125
4.7 Services 129
4.8 Logging 131
4.9 Summary 134
Chapter 5 Honeyd -- Advanced Topics 135
5.1 Advanced Configuration 136
5.2 Emulating Services 139
5.3 Subsystems 142
5.4 Internal Python Services 146
5.5 Dynamic Templates 148
5.6 Routing Topology 150
5.7 Honeydstats 154
5.8 Honeydctl 156
5.9 Honeycomb 158
5.10 Performance 160
5.11 Summary 161
Chapter 6 Collecting Malware with Honeypots 163
6.1 A Primer on Malicious Software 164
6.2 Nepenthes -- A Honeypot Solution to Collect Malware 165
6.3 Honeytrap 197
6.4 Other Honeypot Solutions for Learning About Malware 204
6.5 Summary 207
Chapter 7 Hybrid Systems 209
7.1 Collapsar 211
7.2 Potemkin 214
7.3 RolePlayer 220
7.4 Research Summary 224
7.5 Building Your Own Hybrid Honeypot System 224
7.6 Summary 230
Chapter 8 Client Honeypots 231
8.1 Learning More About Client-Side Threats 232
8.2 Low-Interaction Client Honeypots 241
8.3 High-Interaction Client Honeypots 253
8.4 Other Approaches 263
8.5 Summary 272
Chapter 9 Detecting Honeypots 273
9.1 Detecting Low-Interaction Honeypots 274
9.2 Detecting High-Interaction Honeypots 280
9.3 Detecting Rootkits 302
9.4 Summary 305
Chapter 10 Case Studies 307
10.1 Blast-o-Mat: Using Nepenthes to Detect Infected Clients 308
10.2 Search Worms 327
10.3 Red Hat 8.0 Compromise 332
10.4 Windows 2000 Compromise 343
10.5 SUSE 9.1 Compromise 351
10.6 Summary 357
Chapter 11 Tracking Botnets 359
11.1 Bot and Botnet 101 360
11.2 Tracking Botnets 373
11.3 Case Studies 376
11.4 Defending Against Bots 387
11.5 Summary 390
Chapter 12 Analyzing Malware with CWSandbox 391
12.1 CWSandbox Overview 392
12.2 Behavior-Based Malware Analysis 394
12.3 CWSandbox -- System Description 401
12.4 Results 405
12.5 Summary 413
Bibliography 415
Index 423
Customer Reviews
Customer Reviews: 1 Average Customer Rating: Jul 18, 2008 Raul Siles
THE current reference about honeynet technologies and solutions
Honeynet solutions were seen just as a research technology a couple of years ago. It is not the case anymore. Due to the inherent constraints and limitations of the current and widely deployed intrusion detection solutions, like IDS/IPS and antivirus, it is time to extended our detection arsenal and capabilities with new tools: virtual honeypots.
Do not get confused about the book title, specially about the "virtual" term. The main reason to mention virtual honeypots, although the book covers all kind of honeynet/honeypot technologies, is because during the last few years virtualization has been a key element in the deployment of honeynets. It has offered us a significant cost reduction, more flexibility, reusability and multiple benefits. The main drawback of this solution is the detection of virtual environments by some malware specimens.
The detection of honeypots has always been one of the main concerns in the honeynet community, basically because if the attacker can identify them, they are useless. For this reason, one of the chapters is just focused on providing some light, tips, and tricks about what an adversary can really accomplish. In fact, we have not seen lots of real-world incidents where the attacker actively checks the existence of honeynet setups.
I have been working with honeynets during the last 5 years. We founded the Spanish Honeynet Project on 2004, and almost at the same time we became part of The Honeynet Project and released the Scan of the Month 32. The main honeynet/pot book reference till last year was the book published by the Honeynet Project. As this is a rapidly evolving field, definitely it has been replaced by this book, written by two project members.
The first chapter is a very brief introduction to honeynet technologies and basic tools. You can jump through it if you are not new to this field. Then, the book covers the main two honeypots types: high and low interaction. The high interaction section provides details about the tools to virtualize your honeypots: VMware, UML, or more specific solutions, such as Argos. The low interaction section provides details about some the most relevant honeypot types to cover lots of detection scenarios: worms, traditional server attacks, Google Hacking, Web-based attacks, etc. It is a wide overview that will give you lot of ideas for new deployments.
The whole book has been cooked with a how-to mentality , and it explains in detail how to install and configure the different tools and software elements covered. Additionally, it provides guidelines, best practices, and analysis recommendations for each tool based on the authors experience. However, for the how to portions take into account that most of the solutions are Linux-based, and the installation and setup process will vary based on the tool version and the Linux distribution you are using (library dependencies, etc). In any case, the step by step guides are very useful as a general setup reference.
From my perspective, the most valuable part of the book is chapters 4 to 6. The authors, Niels Provos and Throsten Holz, are the lead developers/architects for honeyd (chapter 4 and 5) and nephentes (chapter 6), respectively. These two are the most famous and advanced low-interaction server-based honeypot and malware honeypot. They know what they are talking about :), and you cannot find a better reference out there for these two tools. The book is an excellent guide, covering from the design principles and innovative deployment ideas, to all kinds of configuration options and possibilities, including limitations on real-world scenarios. Chapter 6 is complemented with other less popular malware-based honeypots (except for Honeytrap).
The book includes some extra material, covering academic and research hybrid solution, still on their early stages, but that can give you and idea of where these technologies are evolving to and the major challenges we are facing nowadays. This pretty much theoretical content is well balanced with the case studies chapter, where real incidents involving different honeypot types are presented. These are always a fun read and a way of getting experience and learn how to deal with intrusions.
Finally, one of the main expansion areas we are involved today is the creation of new client-based honeypot technologies. This book section (highly recommended) does a great job introducing multiple high and low interaction honeyclients currently available, their benefits and drawbacks (chapter 7). This information is perfectly complemented by the last two chapters, focused on tracking botnets and analyzing malware with sandbox environments. Once a client is compromised, it typically becomes a member of a botnet, and for easy and quick categorization, we start by performing a malware analysis of the specimens. I recommend you to add all this knowledge to your incident handling and response capabilities.
Something I would have liked to see in the book is a section about a fully virtualized honeynet environment, showing how using VMware, you can build up a virtual Honeywall (just slightly mentioned on chapter 2) and different honeypots, creating a complete, cheap, mobile and multi-purpose virtual honeynet infrastructure. Also, we receive multiple questions related to this kind of setup in the Honeynet Project mailing lists, because all the previous whitepapers are obsoleted now. I've been deploying these type of solutions for fun and professionally during the last few years and I strongly recommend you to start using them. You won't be disappointed about how much you can learn of what is going on in your networks and systems, and this book is the best starting point.
If you have any relationship with the intrusion detection, incident handling and forensics, threat analysis, or SOC and CERT security side of things, definitely this book is for you. Go through it and improve your capabilities with easy to deploy virtual honeypot solutions. You just need a (not so new) computer, virtualization software, and some time!
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