Cowrie - SSH/Telnet Honeypot


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:
  • SFTP and SCP support for file upload
  • Support for SSH exec commands
  • Logging of direct-tcp connection attempts (ssh proxying)
  • Forward SMTP connections to SMTP Honeypot (e.g. mailoney)
  • Logging in JSON format for easy processing in log management solutions
  • Many, many additional commands

Requirements
Software required:
  • Python 2.7+, (Python 3 not yet supported due to Twisted dependencies)
  • python-virtualenv
For Python dependencies, see requirements.txt

Files of interest:
  • 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

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Cowrie - SSH/Telnet Honeypot Cowrie - SSH/Telnet Honeypot Reviewed by Zion3R on 11:30 AM Rating: 5