honeyshell

Honeyshell

An extensible SSH honeypot written entirely in Go, using crypto/ssh as its base.

Currently, it allows connections on the server and collects failed login attempts, meaning all usernames and passwords. Also, you can decrease the permissions on the process by flipping to a different user (ie 'nobody').

A version running libssh can be found in the legacy branch. It has been tested up to version 0.10 of the library. Two functions that it's using have been deprecated and I was trying to get rid of them with the work on the c-branch branch. The code on c-branch hasn't been fully tested and is buggy, because the libssh team decided to swittch to a callback model and I had to improvise on how to get it to work with Go.

Building

To compile the program, simply run make in your terminal.

Running

The default port is 22 and no user is mandatory, but the -key is, so make sure you set one.

Usage of ./honeyshell:
  -banner string
        The banner for the SSH server (default "SSH-2.0-OpenSSH_7.4p1 Raspbian-10+deb9u3")
  -key string
        The RSA key to use
  -plugins string
        The path to the folder containing the plugins
  -port int
        The port the deamon should run on (default 22)
  -user string
        Set the permissions to a certain user (ie 'nobody')
  -verbose
        Print out debug messages
  -vfs string
        The path to the VFS (virtual file system) JSON file

Example usage:

sudo ./honeyshell -user nobody -port 2222 -key ~/.ssh/key_for_honeypot_rsa

The output should look something like this:

2022/12/27 11:30:09 Starting on port 2222
2022/12/27 11:30:09 Changing permissions to user 'nobody'
2022/12/27 11:30:12 127.0.0.1:54476 test key:442f78a53b6188a6b18a225c86aeb9c77592add0d714d26f8d84c9e4f9f59a77 (ssh-rsa)
2022/12/27 11:30:12 127.0.0.1:54476 test key:dfde57ac7251135922968b933fd28944e384a504515ba7ce27cd925224af4657 (ssh-rsa)
2022/12/27 11:30:12 127.0.0.1:54476 test key:c09d0feddad874b7a2cd82bdc4b846632fa47a7113a17cf8c846876a5f4eaf4a (ssh-rsa)
2022/12/27 11:30:12 127.0.0.1:54476 test key:589adac413c8d42c9166dd0e56d2da5cdeaf4abd731f001b3fa40b3c6232383b (ssh-rsa)
2022/12/27 11:30:12 Error during handshake ssh: disconnect, reason 2: too many authentication failures
2022/12/27 11:30:19 127.0.0.1:54478 test pass:test
2022/12/27 11:30:20 127.0.0.1:54478 test pass:admin
2022/12/27 11:30:26 127.0.0.1:54478 test pass:password123

Plugins

Honeyshell has a Lua-based plugin engine (documentation is still being worked on) which enables you to do whatever you want with the information that's received. For example, You can:

1. Send all username and password pairs to a webhook.
2. Aggregate the IPs that attempt to connect by country and time.
3. Build an entire Bash emulation shell.

If your end goal is to emulate a system, you should make a snapshot of an existing filesystem and save it into a JSON file with the vfsutil command line tool.

Plans are being drafted on using WebAssembly in the future, but I won't get started soon as there are things that are misisng that will be needed.

A plugin that defines a prompt and a command can be found in this repository.

License

Although the license for the source code is GNU GPL v3, I prohibit the use of the code herein for the training of any kind of AI model.