Apate

Abstract

Apate is a user-friendly, CISO-friendly configuration, management and acquisition tool for honeyd. honeyd is a wonderful tool. As the authors wrote "Honeyd is a small daemon that creates virtual hosts on a network. The hosts can be configured to run arbitrary services, and their personality can be adapted so that they appear to be running certain operating systems.". honeyd is very well written with many features and capabilities to simulate honeypots across your network. The main challenge this tool raises is the complication level of deploying those honeypots along with managing and understanding the logfiles it create. For this purpose Apate as created. Apate does not replace honeyd or its functionality but rather to provide a usable interface for configuring, deploying and receiving the logs of the system.

Installation & Configuration

In order for Apate to work it needs to have 2 things:

1. A server to run Apate. You will use this to configure the hosts and virtual environment. It will also collect and display the incoming information from the honeypot to use.
2. At least one honeypot host. You will configure this server to run the actual honeypots and collect and report the logs back to the main server for analysis and visualization.

Creating Honeypot Host Machine

1. Use a debian based image. Preferably an Ubuntu or Raspbian. We'll first need to install some packages for the compilation process as we are to assume that the package honeyd does not exist in the repository.

sudo apt-get install farpd libevent-dev libdumbnet-dev libpcap-dev libpcre3-dev libedit-dev bison flex libtool automake1.11 git zlib1g-dev openssh-server

1. After we have got them all installed go a head and clone the original repository for the compilation process.

git clone https://github.com/DataSoft/Honeyd

3. To start the compilation process:

cd Honeyd
./autogen.sh
./configure
make
sudo make install

At this stage honeyd should be ready for use if everything went okay. You can verify that honeyd finished installation by typing in which honeyd and see if you get the location of the honeyd installation binary.

1. Add the user to sudoers and configure no password for sudo command. Add the user you're working on to the sudoers for no password requested. Edit /etc/sudoers and add the following line:

username ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:ALL

1. Change permissing to important directories. There are several directories used by this. Make sure that permissions on them are 777. If you're not sure just copy-paste this:

sudo mkdir -p /var/logs/apate
sudo mkdir -p /etc/apate
sudo chmod 777 /var/logs/apate
sudo chmod 777 /etc/apate

Configure the Main Server

So on this server you're going to configure and run the main code to which Apate is relevant. Get the source using git and clone it to that machine.

After that, the only thing you should do for it to work is:

sudo pip install -r requirements.txt
sudo apt-get install libffi libffi-dev openssl libssl-dev python-openssl python-dev

IMPORTANT NOTICE : Apate creates sockets to get the logs back from the machines. It is recommended to disable the firewall on that machine OR open up all incoming ports between 10000-20000 TCP.

Of course you need to have python and pip installed in order to use the previous command.

Usage

After you've installed everything you should be able to run Apate without an issue. First, you should configure/create a database. By default Apate uses SQLite3 as the engine but you can replace that by going to the Django settings.py in the WP folder. Assuming you want to keep on with the default DB engine you should create an empty database with the appropriate structure by issuing the following command.

python manage.py migrate

After this you can start the server on the localhost by running:

python manage.py runserver

Or you can run it and make it accisble from any machine by: running:

sudo python manage.py runserver 0.0.0.0:80

Configure SwarmQueen

Here you can configure a new main server which will execute the virtual honeypots. You don't need much. Just SSH credentials, IP and network interface to use.

Configure WorkingBees

Here you create a new honeypot and define the settings. Device is the personality of that VM. This is how it should behave on an OS level. Services is a drop-down menu to choose which services should be running on that machine, and the Relevant Device is the server which will run the honeypot.

Start WorkingBees

This is where you can see a list of all honeypots in the system. You can run them, download the configurations, delete them or view their logs. Hit the sunshine to start up the honeypot.

View WorkingBees Raw Logs

In this screen you can see any packet that came in, length, flags, ports etc. This is a parsed version of the regular honeyd log.

View Evaluations

So this is where you see the actual analysis. If you get one ping attempt or just 2 or 3 ports accessed you will be able to see it in the raw log but not here. This is a logic that analyses the regular log and prints out what it understand from it. So ping sweeps and port scans should be visible here.

API

Currently, Apate is only able to send out data with the API. Later, after authentication is added, we will add support for writing data into the system.

Examples of information you can get from the API:

wget http://127.0.0.1:8000/api/devices
wget http://127.0.0.1:8000/api/honeypots
wget http://127.0.0.1:8000/api/logs
wget http://127.0.0.1:8000/api/evals

Each will return a json object with the list of devices, honeypots, logs and evaulations by the system.

Work Flow

So this is how Apate operates on the logical level.

And this is how it operates with the actual code and classes.

License

Apate was developed by Yuval tisf Nativ for Agoda Pte LTD. and is released under GPLv3.

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.

Change log

0.9 Beta Release

• Convert ssh_wrapper to use Paramiko only.
• Create a requirements file.
• Create remote API to push and read the information from the system.
• Fix the 'Close' function on HoneyDWrapper.
• Enable ping back sleep time to user interface.
• Update screenshots in README.md

v1.0

• Finish Export settings (HP and Device)
• Make logging a part of the DB.
• Create an Edit Settings form.
• When loading, if active receptions are active, create listener.
• Do an story line of how this works and what it does during various stages.
• Add Import settings.
• Fix diplay graphs at dashboard.

Later

• Harvest services log as well.
• Modify harvesting script that if failed 5 times, change delay to 15 minutes and count 20 misses before killing itself.
• Add the harvester script as a service.
• Authentication!