Real-Time emulation of intrusion victim in honeyfarm

Abstract

Security becomes increasingly important. However, existing security tools, almost all defensive, have many vulnerabilities which are hard to overcome because of the lack of information about hackers techniques or powerful tools to distinguish malicious traffic from the huge volume of production traffic. Although honeypots mainly aim at collecting information about hackers' behaviors, they are not very effective in that honeypot implementers tend to block or limit hackers' outbound connections to avoid harming non-honeypot systems, thus making honeypots easy to be fingerprinted. Additionally, the main concern is that if hackers were allowed outbound connections, they may attack the actual servers thus the honeypot could become a facilitator of the hacking crime. In this paper we present a new method to real-time emulate intrusion victims in a honeyfarm. When hackers request outbound connections, they are redirected to the intrusion victims which emulate the real targets. This method provides hackers with a less suspicious environment and reduces the risk of harming other systems. © Springer-Verlag 2004.