HONEY POTS

          

   Honey pots are an exciting new technology. They allow us to turn the tables on the bad guys.

        A honeypot is used in the area of computer and Internet security. It is a resource, which is intended to be attacked and computerized to gain more information about the attacker, and used tools. Our discussion in this paper is to show the possibilities of Honeypots and their use in research as well as productive environment.

            Compared to an intrusion detection system, honey pots have the big advantage that they do not generate false alerts as each observed traffic is suspicious, because no productive components are running in the system.

INTRODUCTION

                Global communication is getting more important every day. At the same time, computer crimes increasing. Counter measures are developed to detect or prevent attacks-most of these measures are based on known facts, known attack patterns. As in the military, it is important to know, who your enemy is, what kind of strategy he uses, what tools he utilizes and what he is aiming for. Gathering this kind of information is not easy but important. By knowing attack strategies, countermeasures can be improved and vulnerabilities can be fixed. To gather as much information as possible is one main goal of honeypot.

                 A honeypot is primarily an instrument for the information gathering and learning. Its primary purpose is not to be ambush for the blackhat community to catch them in action and to press charges against them. The lies on silent collection of as much information as possible about their attack patterns, used programs, purpose of attack and blackhat community itself.               

Honeypots are not the perfect solution for solving or preventing computer crimes. Honeypots are hard to maintain and they need the good knowledge about the operating systems and network security. In the right hands honeypot is effective tool for the information gathering. In the wrong, inexperienced hands, a honeypot can become another infiltrated machine and an instrument for the black hat community.

HONEYPOT BASICS

                 A honeypot is a resource whose value is being in attacked and compromised. This means, that a honeypot is expected to get probed, attacked and potentially exploited.

Honeypot do not fix anything. They provide us additional, valuable information.

A honeypot is expected to be attacked or compromised. The main goals are the distraction of an attacker and the gain of the information about the attack and the attacker.

Value of honey pots:

There are two categories of Honeypots.

Ø  Production Honeypots

Ø  Research Honeypots

             A production honeypot is used to help migrate risk in an organization while the second category, is meant to gather as much information as possible. These Honeypots do not add any security value to an organization but they can help to understand the blackhat community and their attacks as well as to build some better defenses against security threats. A properly constructed honeypot is put on a network, which closely monitors the traffic to and from the honeypot. This data can be used for a variety of purposes.

Ø  Forensicsàanalyzing new attacks and exploits

Ø  Trend analysisàlook for changes over time of types of attacks, techniques, etc

Ø  Identificationàtracks the bad guys back to their home machines to figure out who they are.

Ø  Sociologyàlearns about the bad guys as a group by snooping on email, IRC traffic, etc which happens to traverse the honeypot.

               In general every traffic from and to a honeypot is unauthorized activity. All the data that is collected by a honeypot is therefore interested data. Data collected by the honeypot is of high value, and can lead to better understanding and knowledge which in turn can help to increase overall network security.

 One can also argue that a honeypot can be used for prevention because it can deter attackers from attacking other systems by occupying them long enough and bind their resources.

CONCEPTUAL DETAILS

Low-involvement honey:  A low-level involvement honeypot typically only provides certain fake services. In a basic form, these services could be implemented by having a listener on specific port.

In such a way, all incoming traffic can easily be recognized and stored. With such a simple solution it is not possible to catch communication of complex protocols. On a low-level honeypot there is no real operating system that attacker can operate on.

This will minimize the risk significantly because the complexity of an operating system is eliminated. On the other hand, this is also disadvantage. It is not possible to watch an attacker interacting with operating system, which could be really interesting. A low-level honeypot is like one-way connection. We only listen; we do not ask any questions.

Mid-involvement honeypot A mid-involvement honeypot provides more to interact with but still does not provide a real underlying operating system. The fake daemons are more sophisticated and have deeper knowledge about the specific services they provide. At the same moment, the risk increases. The probability that attacker can find a security hole or vulnerability is getting bigger because the complexity of honeypot is increasing.

                Through the higher level of interaction, more complexity attacks are possible and can therefore be logged and analyzed. The attacker gets a better illusion of a real operating system. He has more possibilities to interact and probe the system. Developing a mid-involvement honeypot is complex and time consuming. Special care has to be taken for security check as all developed fake daemons needs to be as secure as possible.

High-involvement honeypot A high-involvement honeypot has a real underlying operating system. This leads to much higher risk as the complexity increases rapidly. At the same time, the possibilities to gather the information, the possible attacks as well as the attractiveness increase a lot. As soon as a hacker has gained access, his real work and therefore the interesting part begins.

A high-involvement honeypot is very time consuming. The system should be constantly under surveillance. A honeypot which is not under control is not of much help even become a danger or security hole itself. It is very important to limit a honey pot’s access to local intranet, as the honeypot can be used by black hats as if it was a real compromised system. Limiting outbound traffic is also important point to consider, as the danger once a system is fully compromised can be reduced.

                   By providing a full operating system to attacker, he has the possibilities to upload and install new files. This is where the high-involvement honeypot can show its strength, as all its actions can be recorded and analyzed.

HONEYPOT LOCATION

A honeypot does not need a certain surrounding environment, as it is a standard server with no special needs. A honeypot can be placed anywhere a server could be placed. But certainly, some places are better for certain approaches as others.

  A honeypot can be used on the Internet as well as the intranet, based on the needed service. Placing a honeypot on the intranet can be useful if the detection of some bad guys inside a private network is wished. If the main concern is the Internet, a honeypot can be placed at two locations:

               1. In front of firewalls (Internet)

               2. DMZ

               3. behind the firewall (Intranet)

In front of firewalls: By placing the honeypot in front of firewall the risk for the internal works does not increases. A honeypot will attract and generate lot of unwished traffic like port scans or attack patterns. By placing a honeypot outside the firewall, such events do not get logged by the firewall and an internal IDS system will not generate alerts. Otherwise a lot of alerts would be generated on the firewall or IDS.

      Probably the biggest advantage is that the firewall or IDS. Running a honeypot does therefore not increase the dangers for the internal network nor does it introduce new risks.  

DMZ: Placing a honeypot inside DMZ seems a good solution as long as the other systems inside the DMZ can be secured against the honeypot

             Most DMZs are not fully accessible as only needed services are allowed to pass the firewall. In such a case, placing the honeypot in front of the firewall should be favored as opening all corresponding ports on the fire is too time consuming and risky.     

Behind the firewall: A honeypot behind a firewall can introduce new security risks to the internal network, especially if the internal network is not secured against the honeypot through additional firewalls. This could be a special problem if the Ips is used for authentication.

By placing the honeypot behind a firewall, it is inevitable to adjust the firewall rules if access from internet should be permitted. The biggest problem arises as soon as the internal honeypot is compromised by an external attacker. He gains the possibility to access the internal network through the honeypot.

This traffic will be unstopped by the firewall as it is regarded as traffic to the honeypot only, which in turn is granted. Securing an internal honeypot is therefore mandatory, especially if it is a high-involvement honeypot. The main reason for placing a honeypot behind a firewall could be to detect internal attackers.

               The best solution would be to run a honeypot in its own DMZ, therefore with a preliminary firewall. The firewall could be connected directly to the internet or intranet, depending on the goal. This attempt enables tight control as well as flexible environment with maximal security.

HOST BASED INFORMATION GATHERING This section will discussion possibilities that offer gain of information about ongoing on a honeypot by installing information gathering mechanisms on the honeypot itself.

BASIC POSSIBILITIES Information gathering facilities can basically be grouped into two categories; facilities that generate streams of information and facilities that offer the information to peek into the system and get the information about a certain state of the honeypot.

Microsoft windows One could think the large amount of observed attacks on systems running ms windows operating system makes them ideal for the honeypot, but unfortunately the structure of this operating system makes the data gathering rather difficult.

                  

Until today the source code of the operating system of Microsoft is not freely available, which means that changes to the operating system are very hard to achieve.

UNIX derivates UNIX derivatives operating system offers interesting opportunities for deploying data gathering mechanisms since all of their components are available as source code.

         Network based Information Gathering: Host based information gathering is always located at the host itself and is therefore vulnerable to detection and once detected it can also be disabled. Network based information gathering does not have to be located on the honeypot itself. It can also be implemented in an invisible way, as network traffic only gets analyzed but not manipulated. Network based information gathering is safer as it is harder to be detected and quiet impossible to disable.

     

ATTRACTIVENESS

               Being the owner of a honeypot can be an interesting experience, but what if the members of the blackhat community do not find their way to the honeypot or, even more dramatically, are not interested in the honeypot at all.

Another approach to lure attackers is the offering of the interesting services on the honeypot. Of course the question arises, what an interesting services is or what it should look like.

      ADVANTAGES

Ø  Small Data setsàHoneypots only collect attack or unauthorized activity, dramatically reducing the amount of data they collect. Organizations that may log thousands of alerts a day may only log a hundred alerts with Honeypots. This makes the data Honeypots collect much easier to manage and analyze.

Ø  PositivesàHoneypots dramatically reduce false alerts, as they only capture unauthorized activity.

Ø  NegativesàHoneypots can easily identify and capture new attacks never seen before.

Ø  Minimal resources

CONCLUSION

Honeypot is not a solution to network security but a good tool supplements other security technologies to form an alternative active defense system for network security. Working with IDS and firewall, Honeypot provides new way t o   attacks prevention, detection and reaction.         A honeypot is just a tool. How you use that tool is up to you. There are a variety of honeypot options, each having different value to organizations.

REFERENCES

IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics,pp. 2275-2280,Oct.  

http://www.cert.org/reports/dsitribution