Kippo Honeypot: Log Replay Automation

Kippo is one of my favorite honeypots due to its sheer simplicity, portability, and ease-of-use. It comes with a really neat feature that allows you to replay what the attacker did once they gained access to the honeypot by way of the playlog.py script. This is a somewhat lesser-known feature within Kippo that can be valuable as it gives the analyst insight into how the attacker interacted with the server , what commands they ran, what services were installed, potentially what Command and Control server they are operating from and much more.

While you can already pull this data in to LogRhythm to gather important information using the extracted metadata, it’s another thing entirely to watch the attacker in action. This feature helps to determine whether it is an actual person or a bot interacting with the host. The problem, however, is that this takes time and effort to manually log in to each honeypot, run the script against each TTY session log, and review the results. Why not automate this process? Below is an example of a real attack and some valuable data that was observed in an SSH session with a Kippo honeypot (in this case a malware payload was downloaded).

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Figure 1: Kippo replay of basic C2 post exploitation activity

As you can see from the screenshot above, whenever an attacker successfully breaches the honeypot, a new TTY log file is generated—this is separate from the kippo.log files we are already pulling in to the SIEM. So, the quickest way to automate this is to create a small bash script on the honeypot host(s). This script is pretty simple, it defines a few environmental variables, runs the playlog.py script and outputs the results of the script to a text file in a separate directory. Once this is complete, it moves the replayed TTY session log to a separate folder, modifies the output so it can be viewed easily on Windows hosts, and sends a notification email to the SOC with the attached log replay file.

This script is available in my forked Kippo repository along with other small additions, here: https://github.com/Greg Foss/kippo.

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Figure 2: Kippo Log Replay Alert Script

We could easily set this up to run via cron, however then we would have limited control of the script execution. Since cron is limited to running on a set schedule, this has the potential to affect File Integrity Monitoring (FIM) notifications and there may be times when you don’t want the script to execute. So, the easiest way to do this would be to use a LogRhythm SmartResponse™. First we need to set up a new FIM policy, for this use case I simply cloned the existing Linux FIM policy and added the /opt/kippo/log/tty/ directory, configuring it to check for any new log files every 10 minutes.

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Figure 3: File Integrity Monitoring Policy Update
Now with the new FIM policy in place, a log file will be generated whenever changes are observed in this folder. Reviewing the log metadata allows us to see what attributes we can alert on.

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Figure 4: Kippo FIM Event—Log Details

As you can see from the screenshot above, we can create a simple Advanced Intelligence Engine™ (AIE rule that checks for the above common event, object, and log source…

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Figure 5: Kippo Log Replay FIM Alert

Now for the fun part, we need to set up a SmartResponse™ to trigger whenever this rule fires. We can do this using any scripting language, but for this proof of concept, I chose PowerShell. All we need to do is authenticate to the server using Plink and run the aforementioned bash script remotely by way of a quick PowerShell one-liner that Andrew Hollister put together.

cmd /c plink.exe -ssh -i key.ppk -noagent -m commands.txt $UserName@$TargetHost <yes.txt

Using this script, we can build the SmartResponse™ and configure the script to run whenever the associated AIE rule fires. At this point, it is possible to configure approvers if desired. With the new action in place, enable the AIE rule and test to assure everything is working as intended.

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Figure 6: SmartResponse™ Action Approval

If all goes well, you will receive an email notification with an attached log message displaying full details of the attacker’s replayed TTY session.

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Figure 7: Auto Replay Email Alert

Using SmartResponse™ to automate TTY session replays, extracting the session log, and forwarding this on within an email can help security analysts, researchers, etc. quickly analyse the attack and gather useful data very easily. While the general honeypot metadata already being captured by the SIEM is excellent, it can be drastically improved by automating Kippo’s attack replay capabilities. Not only will this give analysts a better idea of who is attacking them and what methods they are using, but it can serve as an early-warning indicator, complimenting the wealth of information already being extracted from the honeypot metadata.

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Figure 8: Honeypot Analytics Dashboard