Towards an invisible honeypot monitoring system

Abstract

Honeypot is a decoy system to trap attackers, and data capture tool is one of the components of the honeypot architecture. Being used to collect the intruder's activities inside the honeypot, this key component must be able to function as stealthily as possible, so the intruder does not know that he is under watch. Unfortunately Sebek, a de-facto tool for this purpose in the modern honeypot technology, is rather easy to detect, even with unprivileged right access. This paper proposes to use Xen Virtual Machine to deploy honeypot, and takes the advantage introduced by Xen to fix some of the outstanding problems of Sebek. We present a design and implementation of a Xen-based system named Xebek as a solution. While Xebek provides similar features as Sebek does, our system is more "invisible" and harder to defeat. The experimental results also demonstrate that Xebek is more flexible, while the reliability and efficiency are significantly improved over its counterpart. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.