Looking for Honey Once Again: Detecting RDP and SMB Honeypots on the Internet

Authors: Fabian Franzen, Lion Steger, Johannes Zirngibl, Patrick Sattler

Published in International Workshop on Traffic Measurements for Cybersecurity 2022, 2022

Abstract:
Honeypots are a widely used technique to observe the spread of malware and the emergence of new exploits. Attackers try to avoid connecting to honeypots as they reveal the attacker's methods, tools, and exploits. While different honeypot implementations have been fingerprinted in the past, we see a lack of studies covering Windows-related protocols such as Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) and Server Message Block (SMB) honeypots. However, these protocols have seen at least two major security vulnerabilities in the past 5 years and are commonly exploited. We adapted existing fingerprinting algorithms to allow an accurate identification of RDP and SMB honeypots checking how implementations behave in error conditions. We present a new improvement, namely the inclusion of system TLS stack features previously not used for honeypot detection. We are the first to perform an internet-wide scan searching for RDP and SMB honeypots. We are able to effectively uncover the presence of two common open-source honeypots for RDP and SMB each. We identified 84 instances of Heralding (RDP), 1123 instances of RDPY (RDP), 60 instances of Impacket (SMB), and 1461 instances of Dionaea (SMB) during our scans. Furthermore, we found several hosts, which do not use Microsoft's SChannel TLS stack, but advertise themselves as Windows machines. This indicates the presence of a Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) box and could be a sign of a honeypot. Eventually, we analyzed how attackers interact with detectable honeypots. We deployed instances of RDP honeypots ourselves and found that credential guessing attackers seem to avoid them. This proves that RDP and SMB honeypots are finger-printable and that even MitM-box-based high-interaction honeypots leave detectable traces.

Recommended citation: Fabian Franzen, Lion Steger, Johannes Zirngibl, Patrick Sattler, "Looking for Honey Once Again: Detecting RDP and SMB Honeypots on the Internet." International Workshop on Traffic Measurements for Cybersecurity 2022, 2022.