A Survey: Recent Advances and Future Trends in Honeypot Research

Abstract

This paper presents a survey on recent advances in honeypot research from a review of 80+ papers on honeypots and related topics mostly published after year 2005. This paper summarizes 60 papers that had significant contribution to the field. In reviewing the literature, it became apparent that the research can be broken down into five major areas: (1) new types of honeypots to cope with emergent new security threats, (2) utilizing honeypot output data to improve the accuracy in threat detections, (3) configuring honeypots to reduce the cost of maintaining honeypots as well as to improve the accuracy in threat detections, (4) counteracting honeypot detections by attackers, and (5) legal and ethical issues in using honeypots. Our literature reviews indicate that the advances in the first four areas reflect the recent changes in our networking environments, such as those in user demography and the ways those diverse users use new applications. Our literature reviews on legal and ethical issues in using honeypots reveals that there has not been widely accepted agreement on the legal and ethical issues about honeypots, which must be an important agenda in future honeypot research.