SSH Honeypot

This program listens for incoming ssh connections and logs the ip address, username, and password used. This was written to gather rudimentary intelligence on brute force attacks.

output only username&passwords

USE : awk '{print $7,$8}' ssh-honeypot.log > passlist

Quickstart

Linux

Make sure libssh is installed

$ apt install libssh-dev

OSX

Make sure that xcode is up to date.

Install libssh

$ brew install libssh

Specify MakefileOSX with make:

$ make -f MakefileOSX

Build and Run

$ make
$ ssh-keygen -t rsa -f ./ssh-honeypot.rsa
$ bin/ssh-honeypot -r ./ssh-honeypot.rsa

Usage

$ bin/ssh-honeypot -h

Syslog facilities

As of version 0.0.5, this supports logging to syslog. This feature is toggled with the -s flag. It is up to you to configure your syslog facilities appropriately. This logs to LOG_AUTHPRIV which is typically /var/log/auth.log. You may want to modify this to use one of the LOG_LOCAL facilities if you are worried about password leakage.

This was implemented to aggregate the data from several hosts into a centralized spot.

Dropping privileges

As of version 0.0.8, you can drop root privileges of this program after binding to a privileged port. You can now run this as nobody on port 22 for example instead of root, but have to initially start it as root:

$ sudo bin/ssh-honeypot -p 22 -u nobody

Beware that this chowns the logfile to the user specified as well.

running the honeypot on port 22

Change the port of your ssh server from 22 to something like 2222 - check out this for help!

$ https://www.godaddy.com/help/changing-the-ssh-port-for-your-linux-server-7306

Changing the Banner

List available banners

$ bin/ssh-honeypot -b

Set banner string

$ bin/ssh-honeypot -b "my banner string"

Set banner by index

$ bin/ssh-honeypot -i <banner index>