None of Your Beeswax!

A Next-Generation Honeypot

There are a wide variety of open source honeypot solutions available on the market, but most of these emulate the behavior of vulnerable software instead of directly observing the actions of the actual vulnerable software. The flaw in this approach is that if emulator and the original vulnerable software differ in behavior the malware author can discover that the system is actually a honeypot. Software inside the honeypot should be unable to observe software outside of the honeypot. However, software outside of the honeypot can safely peak over the walls of the container by querying the proper kernel namespaces. In this way, malware inside the honeypot will conclude that it is running on a bare-bones container host, but will be ignorant of the fact that its actions are being observed.

We will focus on observing the container’s network traffic, which files change within the container, and which programs are executed. In order to observe the container’s network traffic we will use tcpdump on the host to log network traffic within the container’s kernel namespace. I believe this will be undetectable by the malware within the container. To observe files changing within the container we will consider using tools which use the kernel’s Inotify apis to observe changes within the container filesystem from the host. To track whether new programs are executed we will likely observe the host's /proc filesystem, but further research is needed.

Our first platform to build will be WordPress because of its widespread use and notorious security vulnerabilities. We will build a system consisting of two Docker containers. The first will be the Apache web server and WordPress instance. The second will be the backing MySQL database. Apache, WordPress, and MySQL will have configurations as close to default as possible, including using default passwords. Of course, changing this configuration will be literally changing the appropriate config files and rebuilding the containers.

High Level Architecture

Before discussing technologies involved in the honeypot system, it is important to create a high level design to describe how it will work and determine what technologies will be needed. The system has four tasks:

Starting and configuring the honeypot.
Monitoring the honeypot for signs of infection.
Filtering false positives or background noise.
Reporting infection, malware payloads, etc. to the Modern Honeypot Network (MHN).

Consequently, we have divided the system into four components we term the Configurator, Monitor, Filter, and Reporter. Messages will be passed between these components.

Installation

This honeypot only runs on Linux. Luckily for OS X users, there is a Vagrantfile in the root of the repository to make starting development on OS X easy.

Dependencies

You will need this software installed to run the honeypot. If you are using the Vagrantfile this software will be installed as part of provisioning.

Docker
Docker Compose
tcpdump
Golang (build)

Please make sure the docker daemon is running.

Using Vagrant

On OS X you'll need to install VirtualBox and vagrant.

First, initialize and start the vm:

$ vagrant up --provision

Next, ssh to the vm and enter the project directory:

$ vagrant ssh
$ cd gopath/src/github.com/iankronquist/beeswax

Building and Running

Run:

$ make
$ sudo COMPOSE_API_VERSION=1.18 ./beeswax

Next visit http://localhost:8000 in your web browser and finish configuring WordPress.

Development Notes

Configure ip netns:

$ sudo mkdir -p /var/run/netns/
$ sudo ln -sf /proc/`docker inspect -f '{{ .State.Pid }}' beeswax_wordpress_1`/ns/net /var/run/netns/wordpress

$ sudo ip netns exec wordpress tcpdump > dump

You can find all of the files the containers use under here: /mnt/sda1/var/lib/docker/aufs/mnt I found this out from reading docker info

Troubleshooting

If you get the following error trying to run it the first time:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/bin/docker-compose", line 5, in <module>
    from pkg_resources import load_entry_point
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/pkg_resources.py", line 3011, in <module>
    parse_requirements(__requires__), Environment()
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/pkg_resources.py", line 626, in resolve
    raise DistributionNotFound(req)
pkg_resources.DistributionNotFound: backports.ssl-match-hostname>=3.5
exit status 1
panic: exit status 1

Just run the following commands:

$ sudo pip uninstall backports.ssl-match-hostname
$ sudo pip install backports.ssl-match-hostname