Versatile virtual honeynet management framework

Abstract

Honeypots are designed to investigate malicious behaviour. Each type of homogeneous honeypot system has its own characteristics in respect of specific security functionality, and also suffers functional drawbacks that restrict its application scenario. In practical scenarios, therefore, security researchers always need to apply heterogeneous honeypots to cope with different attacks. However, there is a lack of general tools or platforms that can support versatile honeynet deployment in order to investigate the malicious behavior. In this study, the authors propose a versatile virtual honeynet management tool to address this problem. It is a flexible tool that offers security researchers the versatility to deploy various types of honeypots. It can also generate and manage the virtual honeynet through a dynamic configuration approach adapting to the mutable network environment. The experimental results demonstrate that this tool is effective to perform automated honeynet deployment toward a variety of heterogeneous honeypots.