UK Honeynet Project 

EuSecWest08 is over and seems to have been another success. The change of venue from the Victoria Park Plaza to Leicester Square and the Sound nightclub was an interesting move, which could of gone either way but seemed to work for most people and gave the event a slightly more underground, edgy feel. It was also a great location for after hours socialising.

The standard of presentations and content was generally good, with a number of interesting topics and useful new tools being released. Highlights for me were:

• Saumil Shah’s Teflon browser extension, which hooks javascript system calls such as document.write and replaces evil Javascript with harmless divs. This fits well with some of the recent evil JS research we have been doing, and we are going to do some collaboration here in the coming months.
• Alberto Revelli gave an excellent talk on taking SQL Injection vulnerabilities on Windows platform to the next level and using SQLNinja to establish a working remote graphical desktop. Good to see old techniques like building executables from ASCII HTTP requests plus debug.exe coming back into fashion, and an excellent example of how to escalate control from an initial foothold.
• Martyn Ruk’s review of IBM’s MQ middleware and identication of some surprisingly simple potential vulnerabilities in a number of areas. Good to see someone looking at MQ security and building tools for auditing MQ systems.

Hot topics for the press were Justin Ferguson’s talk on exploiting interpreted languages like Python and PERL, resulting in potentially remotely exploitable vulnerabilities in services like the recently released Google App Engine, and Sebastian Muniz’s talk on developing the first public Cisco IOS rootkit. Both were impressive and it will be interesting to see what happens in this space over the next few months.

I gave another lightning talk on Evil Javascript and SpamMonkey, which we hope to start making public soon. You can find the slides here.

As always, one of the best things about the event was the opportunity to meet up with interesting people in a relaxed environment and discuss what they were working on. It was also good to get a chance to catch up with friends and various industry people. Lots of interesting contacts and discussions, and hopefully we’ll release some research in the coming months that will have benefited from them. All in all, another interesting and enjoyable (sleep deprived) SecWest event.

I’m in London this week for EuSecWest08, the European version of the excellent CanSec and PacSec series of conferences, which is happening tomorrow and Thursday in Leicester Square. A couple of scheduled talks are generating interest on the net already:

• Sebastian Muniz’s “Da IOS Rootkit” talk will review his reverse engineering and kernel hooking approach to building a reliable Cisco IOS rootkit
• Justin Ferguson’s “Advances in attacking interpreted languages” will cover the attack surface and potential vulnerabilities in Google’s recently release App Engine.

Hopefully EuSec will be another interesting and entertaining event, with any honeynet-related news and events to follow.

Experimentation with running Nepenthes malware collectors on the OpenWrt emebedded platform continues, so I’ve updated the Nepenthes on OpenWrt HOWTO with information on building x86 ports to run under VMWare and also added build instructions for the Mikrotic Routerboard 532a embedded device.

I recently came across an interesting paper by researchers at Vrije University in Amsterdam (the hosts for last month’s WOMBAT workshop). It details a project they call “Eudaemon” (a good spirit from Greek mythology) which borrows from the heavily instrumented system-wide dynamic taint analysis approach of the Argos honeypot but instead ports Argos’s dynamic taint analysis engine to a user-space emulator called SEAL. Individual suspect processes within a high interaction honeypot can be marked for “possession” by Eudaemon, are temporarily frozen then are passed into SEAL for dynamic taint checking (by transparently pre-loading the emulator library into the memory space for every process and using ptrace to attach to the frozen process) and can be subsequently released cleanly once detailed instrumentation complete. Their initial benchmarks show significant performance improvements over Argos’s system-wide approach (which typically slows down a running virtual machine by an order of magnitude or more), and this appears to be the first security system that allows fully native applications to be switched into emulated operation mid-process. Definitely worth a read from a high interaction honeypot perspective (particularly for client honeypot applications), and I’m looking forward to seeing working code.

For Phase Two of our Global Distributed Honeynet Project (GDH) I’ve been continuing to explore how to extend our sensor deployment footprint at minimum cost. Mixed High and low interaction nodes will always require real server / PC hardware, but for a number of years I’ve been interested in using “plug and play” low interaction-only honeypots such as Nepenthes malware collectors via bootable or embedded devices. These devices are much easier to mass produce and distribute to project members, and with consumer device price levels continuing to fall it has become practical to distribute such sensors on a larger scale internationally (ie hundreds rather than tens of live sensor nodes).

Deployment options are generally based around two models:

1. Local sensor, with honeypot software running locally on the sensor.
2. Gateway sensor, with no honeypot software running locally and instead some form of tunnelling solution (GRE, IPSEC, OpenVPN, Honeymole, etc) being used to transparently bridge IP traffic to a central honeyfarm.

I won’t go into too much detail here at this stage, but as we plan to roll out an expanded data collection system along these lines during 2008 you can expect to see more information here in the future.

As part of the background research into building reliable low cost low interaction honeypots, I’ve recently needed to port a number of tools such as Nepenthes to various embedded devices for testing. As this turned out to be a little more time consuming than originally expected, I’ve posted a HOWTO guide for building Nepenthes on the OpenWRT embedded platform. Hopefully this information might help anyone else interested in similar research save a few hours of confusion.

Jamie and myself from the UK Honeynet Project plus Max Kilger and Thorsten Holz from the UNCC and German Honeynet Project Chapters were in Amsterdam this week for the first workshop held by the European Commission’s 7th Framework WOMBAT project (see previous posts for more details).

The workshop was held at Vrije University south of the city centre and included members of the WOMBAT consortium and invited guests who were active in the fields of honeynet deployments, malware analysis and large scale data collection. Over two days we were introduced to the three year WOMBAT project, its goals and members and a number of short presentations were given by the invited guests from the EU, US, Asia and Australia. David spoke about the Honeynet Project’s various data collection initiatives, including the Global Distributed Honeynet Project (GDH), and Max spoke about attacker profiling models. The proceedings will be published in the journals of IEEE Computer Society later in the year and we’ll post them when we are able to.

Overall an interesting event with lots of opportunity for collaboration and information sharing that will hopefully come to fruition. Of particular interest was the honeyclient work that the Polish CERT NASK were involved in, which was remarkably similar to our own recent activity on Evil Javascript and SpamMonkey that I gave a lightning talk on at CanSecWest08 last month. Like us, they hope to release their code as open source in the coming weeks and months, so we are look forward to seeing it.

We were happy to be informed that both papers submitted by The Honeynet Project to the upcoming WOMBAT honeynet workshop in Amsterdam this month have been accepted. Max Kilger and Tom Holt from the UNCC Honeynet Project Chapter will be presenting a paper on Techcrafters and Makecrafters: A Comparison of Two Populations of Hackers and I will be presenting Honeynet Project: Data Collection and Data Analysis (with Jamie also attending). We’ll post the paper here once it has completed the review and the IEEE pre-publication process.

I was in Vancouver last week as a backup speaker for CanSecWest08 . Once again, this was an good event, with plenty to keep me interested. It was also a great chance to catch up with Honeynet Project members, various friends in the security community and also to meet up with new people and exchange ideas. Kudos to Dragos for another excellent event, and also to Honeynet Project alumni Shane for winning the Pwn20wn contest for the second year in a row. Presentations should be on the web site shortly.

In the end, and for the first time ever, all the speakers made it to the event and I didn’t need to give a repeat performance of my PacSec07 GDH presentation. However, I did give a lightning talk entitled Evil Javascript and SpamMonkey that introduced a couple of projects the UK Honeynet Project team have been working on recently. You can find the slides here and hopefully we’ll be releasing the code and some sample results in the coming months.