What is Cowrie

Cowrie is a medium interaction SSH and Telnet honeypot designed to log brute force attacks and the shell interaction performed by the attacker.

Cowrie is developed by Michel Oosterhof.

Features

Some interesting features:

Fake filesystem with the ability to add/remove files. A full fake filesystem resembling a Debian 5.0 installation is included
Possibility of adding fake file contents so the attacker can cat files such as /etc/passwd. Only minimal file contents are included
Session logs stored in an UML Compatible format for easy replay with original timings
Cowrie saves files downloaded with wget/curl or uploaded with SFTP and SCP for later inspection

Additional functionality over standard kippo:

cowrie.cfg – Cowrie’s configuration file. Default values can be found in cowrie.cfg.dist
data/fs.pickle – fake filesystem
data/userdb.txt – credentials allowed or disallowed to access the honeypot
dl/ – files transferred from the attacker to the honeypot are stored here
honeyfs/ – file contents for the fake filesystem – feel free to copy a real system here or use bin/fsctl
log/cowrie.json – transaction output in JSON format
log/cowrie.log – log/debug output
log/tty/*.log – session logs
txtcmds/ – file contents for the fake commands
bin/createfs – used to create the fake filesystem
bin/playlog – utility to replay session logs

v1.6.0

2019-03-31 New documentation theme
2019-03-23 Greynoise output plugin (@mzfr)
2019-03-19 direct-tcp forwarding now written to databases (@gborges)
2019-03-19 Reverse DNS output plugin (@mzfr)
2019-03-17 Shell emulation pipe upgrade (@NunoNovais)
2019-03-14 Shell emulation environment variables improved (@NunoNovais)
2019-03-14 SSH crypto parameters now configurable in config file (@msharma)
2019-03-13 Disable keyboard-interactive authentication by default with option to enable
2019-03-13 Added wc, crontab, chpasswd command (@NunoNovais)
2019-
2019-03-07 Output of ssh -V now configurable in cowrie.cfg with ssh_version setting
2019-03-07 Multiple timezone support in cowrie.cfg timezone directive. Default timezone is now UTC for both cowrie.log and cowrie.json
2019-03-12 Handle multiple password prompt. Option to enable or disable keyboard interactive prompt.

Docker versions are available.