riotpot: Resilient IoT and Operational Technology Honeypot

by do son · Published October 23, 2021 · Updated May 1, 2024

RIoTPot

RIoTPot is an interoperable medium interaction honeypot, primarily focused on the emulation of IoT and OT protocols, although, it is also capable of emulating other services.

These services are loaded in the honeypot in the form of plugins, making RIoTPot a modular, and very transportable honeypot. The services are loaded at runtime, meaning that the weight of the honeypot will vary on premisses, and the services loaded e.g. HTTP, will only be used when required. As consequence, we highly recommend building your own binary customized to your own needs. Refer to the following section, Installation, for more information.

Architecture

RIoTPot has a modular architecture that facilitates the extensibility of the honeypot. The honeypot further offers a hybrid-interaction capability where users can choose the desired interaction levels for the protocols simulated. The image below shows the high/level architecture of RIoTPot.

The architecture contains 6 components.

RIoTPot core The core of the honeypot consists of the required modules for configuration, administration, and orchestration of the container network.

Configuration & Orchestration The configuration module provides RIoTPot with all the required parameters at startup. This includes the user preferences for specific protocols and profile simulation and the desired interaction level. The orchestration module is responsible for the network management from the core to the high-interaction protocol services simulated on containers. The received attack traffic is forwarded to the respective container that hosts the protocol on which the attack was targeted. Furthermore, the orchestra tor also facilitates the communication to the containers if they are hosted on a cloud-based environment.

Attack Capture and Noise Filter The attack capture and noise filter module filters out the suspicious traffic received from Internet-wide scanners like Shodan and Censys. This helps the administrator to concentrate on attacks that are not from benign sources.

Hybrid-Interaction (Low and High-Interaction modes) RIoTPot is implemented in Go language \cite{go} and facilitates the modular architecture and development through packages. The packages act as plug-ins that can be added to the honeypot to extend the protocols simulated. RIoTPot offers a hybrid-interaction model with a preference of low- or high-interaction. The low interaction is achieved through independent packages, with each package simulating a specific protocol. The high-interaction model is realized with containers with the protocols simulated as services installed. The containers act as high-interaction modules that offer a full implementation of the protocol. Additional protocol services can be added by the integration of containers with desired protocol services. The hybrid-interaction model further allows the user to emulate selective protocols on low or high-interaction levels. For example, the user can choose to have SSH in low-interaction mode and MQTT in high-interaction mode thereby operating in a hybrid-interaction mode.

Attack Database The attack database stores all the attack traffic received on the honeypot. The database is set up as an independent module to ensure data availability even if the honeypot crashes on potential large-scale attacks. The database is accessible from the low-interaction and high-interaction modules for attack storage.

Noise Filter

The Noise filter module of RIoTPot filters the attacks from internet scanning engines to reduce alert fatigue. With this feature, attacks are labeled as benign when they originate from sources like Shodan. The list of scanning services filtered by RIoTPot is below:

Shodan (https://www.shodan.io/)
Censys (https://censys.io/)
Project Sonar (https://www.rapid7.com/research/project-sonar/)
LeakIX (https://leakix.net/)
ShadowServer (https://www.shadowserver.org/)
RWTH Aachen (http://researchscan.comsys.rwth-aachen.de/)
Quadmetrics (https://www.quadmetrics.com/)
BinaryEdge (https://www.binaryedge.io/})
ipip.net (https://en.ipip.net/)
Arbor Observatory (https://www.arbor-observatory.com/)
CriminalIP (https://security.criminalip.com/)
BitSight (https://www.bitsight.com/)
InterneTT (http://www.internettl.org/)
ONYPHE (https://www.onyphe.io/)
Natlas (https://github.com/natlas/natlas)
Net Systems Research (https://www.netsystemsresearch.com/)
Sharashka (https://sharashka.io/data-feeds)
Alpha Strike Labs (https://www.alphastrike.io)
Stretchoid (http://stretchoid.com/)

Note: the list will be updated on support for additional scanning sources.

Summary: To summarize, the design of RIoTPot facilitates modularity through packages and containers as plugins. Furthermore, the modular architecture helps in achieving a hybrid-interaction model.