ssh-honeypot: Fake sshd that logs ip addresses, usernames, and passwords.
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.
Installation
Requirement:
Linux
$ apt install libssh-devOSX
$ brew install libssh
$ make -f MakefileOSXInstall
$ git clone https://github.com/droberson/ssh-honeypot.git
$ 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 log file to the user specified as well.
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>
