The first step to understanding honeypots is defining what a honeypot is. This can be harder then it sounds. Unlike firewalls or Intrusion Detection Systems, honeypots do not solve a specific problem. Instead, they are a highly flexible tool that comes in many shapes and sizes. They can do everything from detecting encrypted attacks in IPv6 networks to capturing the latest in on-line credit card fraud. Its is this flexibility that gives honeypots their true power. It is also this flexibility that can make them challenging to define and understand. As such, I use the following definition to define what a honeypot is.
A honeypot is an information system resource whose value lies in unauthorized or illicit use of that resource.
This is a general defintion covering all the different manifistations of honeypots. We will be discussing in this paper different examples of honeypots and their value to security. All will fall under the definition we use above, their value lies in the bad guys interacting with them. Conceptually almost all honeypots work they same. They are a resource that has no authorized activity, they do not have any production value. Theoreticlly, a honeypot should see no traffic because it has no legitimate activity. This means any interaction with a honeypot is most likely unauthorized or malicious activity. Any connection attempts to a honeypot are most likely a probe, attack, or compromise. While this concept sounds very simple (and it is), it is this very simplicity that give honeypots their tremendous advantages (and disadvantages). I highlight these below.
Advantages :- Honeypots are a tremendously simply concept, which gives them some very powerful strengths.
☺ New tools and tactics: Honeypots are designed to capture anything thrown at them, including tools or tactics never seen before.
☺ Minimal resources: Honeypots require minimal resources, they only capture bad activity. This means an old Pentium computer with 128MB of RAM can easily handle an entire class B network sitting off an OC-12 network.
☺ Encryption or IPv6: Unlike most security technologies (such as IDS systems) honeypots work fine in encrypted or IPv6 environments. It does not matter what the bad guys throw at a honeypot, the honeypot will detect and capture it.
☺ Information: Honeypots can collect in-depth information that few, if any other technologies can match.
☺ Simplicty: Finally, honeypots are conceptually very simple. There are no fancy algorithms to develop, state tables to maintain, or signatures to update. The simpler a technology, the less likely there will be mistakes or misconfigurations.
Disadvantages :- Like any technology, honeypots also have their weaknesses. It is because of this they do not replace any current technology, but work with existing technologies.
☻ Risk: All security technologies have risk. Firewalls have risk of being penetrated, encryption has the risk of being broken, IDS sensors have the risk of failing to detect attacks. Honeypots are no different, they have risk also. Specifically, honeypots have the risk of being taken over by the bad guy and being used to harm other systems. This risk various for different honeypots. Depending on the type of honeypot, it can have no more risk then an IDS sensor, while some honeypots have a great deal of risk. We identify which honeypots have what levels of risk later in the paper.
Value of Honeypots :-
Now that we have understanding of two general categories of honepyots, we can focus on their value. Specifically, how we can use honeypots. Once again, we have two general categories, honeypots can be used for production purposes or research. When used for production purposes, honeypots are protecting an organization. This would include preventing, detecting, or helping organizations respond to an attack. When used for research purposes, honeypots are being used to collect information. This information has different value to different organizations. Some may want to be studying trends in attacker activity, while others are interested in early warning and prediction, or law enforcement. In general, low-interaction honeypots are often used for production purposes, while high-interaction honeypots are used for research purposes. However, either type of honeypot can be used for either purpose. When used for production purposes, honeypots can protect organizations in one of three ways; prevention, detection, and response. We will take a more in-depth look at how a honeypot can work in all three.
Honeypots can help prevent attacks in several ways. The first is against automated attacks, such as worms or auto-rooters. These attacks are based on tools that randomly scan entire networks looking for vulnerable systems. If vulnerable systems are found, these automated tools will then attack and take over the system (with worms self-replicating, copying themselves to the victim). One way that honeypots can help defend against such attacks is slowing their scanning down, potentially even stopping them. Called sticky honeypots, these solutions monitor unused IP space. When probed by such scanning activity, these honeypots interact with and slow the attacker down. They do this using a variety of TCP tricks, such as a Windows size of zero, putting the attacker into a holding pattern. This is excellent for slowing down or preventing the spread of a worm that has penetrated your internal organization. One such example of a sticky honeypot is LaBrea Tarpit. Sticky honeypots are most often low-interaction solutions (you can almost call them 'no-interaction solutions', as they slow the attacker down to a crawl :). Honeypots can also be protect your organization from human attackers. The concept is deception or deterrence. The idea is to confuse an attacker, to make him waste his time and resources interacting with honeypots. Meanwhile, your organization has detected the attacker's activity and have the time to respond and stop the attacker. This can be even taken one step farther. If an attacker knows your organization is using honeypots, but does not know which systems are honeypots and which systems are legitimate computers, they may be concerned about being caught by honeypots and decided not to attack your organizations. Thus the honeypot deters the attacker. An example of a honeypot designed to do this is Deception Toolkit, a low-interaction honeypot.
The second way honeypots can help protect an organization is through detection. Detection is critical, its purpose is to identify a failure or breakdown in prevention. Regardless of how secure an organization is, there will always be failures, if for no other reasons then humans are involved in the process. By detecting an attacker, you can quickly react to them, stopping or mitigating the damage they do. Tradtionally, detection has proven extremely difficult to do. Technologies such as IDS sensors and systems logs haven proven ineffective for several reasons. They generate far too much data, large percentage of false positives, inability to detect new attacks, and the inability to work in encrypted or IPv6 environments. Honeypots excel at detection, addressing many of these problems of traditional detection. Honeypots reduce false positives by capturing small data sets of high value, capture unknown attacks such as new exploits or polymorphic shellcode, and work in encrypted and IPv6 environments. You can learn more about this in the paper Honeypots: Simple, Cost Effective Detection. In general, low-interaction honeypots make the best solutions for detection. They are easier to deploy and maintain then high-interaction honeypots and have reduced risk.
The third and final way a honeypot can help protect an organization is in reponse. Once an organization has detected a failure, how do they respond? This can often be one of the greatest challenges an organization faces. There is often little information on who the attacker is, how they got in, or how much damage they have done. In these situations detailed information on the attacker's activity are critical. There are two problems compounding incidence response. First, often the very systems compromised cannot be taken offline to analyze. Production systems, such as an organization's mail server, are so critical that even though its been hacked, security professionals may not be able to take the system down and do a proper forensic analysis. Instead, they are limited to analyze the live system while still providing production services. This cripiles the ability to analyze what happend, how much damage the attacker has done, and even if the attacker has broken into other systems. The other problem is even if the system is pulled offline, there is so much data pollution it can be very difficult to determine what the bad guy did. By data pollution, I mean there has been so much activity (user's logging in, mail accounts read, files written to databases, etc) it can be difficult to determine what is normal day-to-day activity, and what is the attacker. Honeypots can help address both problems. Honeypots make an excellent incident resonse tool, as they can quickly and easily be taken offline for a full forensic analysis, without impacting day-to-day business operations. Also, the only activity a honeypot captures is unauthorized or malicious activity. This makes hacked honeypots much easier to analyze then hacked production systems, as any data you retrieve from a honeypot is most likely related to the attacker. The value honeypots provide here is quickly giving organizations the in-depth information they need to rapidly and effectively respond to an incident. In general, high-interaction honeypots make the best solution for response. To respond to an intruder, you need in-depth knowledge on what they did, how they broke in, and the tools they used. For that type of data you most likely need the capabilities of a high-interaction honeypot.
Up to this point we have been talking about how honeypots can be used to protect an organization. We will now talk about a different use for honeypots, research. Honeypots are extremely powerful, not only can they be used to protect your organization, but they can be used to gain extensive information on threats, information few other technologies are capable of gathering. One of the greatest problems security professionals face is a lack of information or intelligence on cyber threats. How can we defend against an enemy when we don't even know who that enemy is? For centuries military organizations have depended on information to better understand who their enemy is and how to defend against them. Why should information security be any different? Research honeypots address this by collecting information on threats. This information can then be used for a variety of purposes, including trend analysis, identifying new tools or methods, identifying attackers and their communities, early warning and prediction, or motivations. One of the most well known examples of using honeypots for research is the work done by the Honeynet Project, an all volunteer, non-profit security research organization. All of the data they collect is with Honeynet distributed around the world. As threats are constantly changing, this information is proving more and more critical.
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