PANDAcap: A framework for streamlining collection of full-system traces

Abstract

Full-system, deterministic record and replay has proven to be an invaluable tool for reverse engineering and systems analysis. However, acquiring a full-system recording typically involves signifcant planning and manual effort. This represents a distraction from the actual goal of recording a trace, i.e. analyzing it. We present PANDAcap, a framework based on PANDA full-system record and replay tool. PANDAcap combines off-the-shelf and custom-built components in order to streamline the process of recording PANDA traces. More importantly, in addition to making the setup of one-off experiments easier, PANDAcap also caters to the streamlining of systematic repeatable experiments in order to create PANDA trace datasets. As a demonstration, we have used PANDAcap to deploy an ssh honeypot aiming to study the actions of brute-force ssh attacks.