Sunday, July 13, 2008

The critique of dshield, honeypots, network telescopes and such...

To start, it's not that those mechanisms are bad, but what they present is only a part of the whole picture. Namely, they give a picture of the opportunistic attacks. In other words, they monitor behavior of automated tools, script kiddies and similar attackers, those that do not target specific victims. The result is that not much sophistication is necessary in such cases. If you can not compromise one target, you do not waste your time but move on to the next potential victim.

Why they only analyse optimistic attacks? Simple, targeted attacks are against victims with some value, and honeypots/honeynets and network telescopes work by using anallocated IP address space and thus there is no value in those addresses. What would be interesting is to see attacks on high profile targets, and surrounding addresses!

As for dshield, which might collect logs from some high profile site, the data collected is too simple to make any judgements about the attackers sophistication. What's more, because of the anonymization of data, this information is lost! Honeypot, on the other hand, do allow such analysis, but those data is not collected from the high profile sites.

In conclusion, it would be usefull to analyse data of attacks on popular sites, or honeypots placed in the same address range as those interesting sites. Maybe even combination of those two approaches would be interesting for analysis.

That's it. Here are some links:

dshiled
honeynets

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scientist, consultant, security specialist, networking guy, system administrator, philosopher ;)

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