Welcome to the official site for the Cowrie SSH and Telnet Honeypot Project!

Cowrie is a medium interaction SSH and Telnet honeypot designed to log brute force attacks and the shell interaction performed by the attacker. Cowrie also functions as an SSH and telnet proxy to observe attacker behavior to another system.

Cowrie is included in Anomalis MHN. and in T-Mobile’s T-Pot.

Clifford Stoll said: Wish that this were available 33 years ago….

Recent Posts

Cowrie: Designing SSH and Telnet Proxies (and Dabbling with Qemu)

These past months I’ve been working in the Google Summer of Code program with The Honeynet Project, in a project called Cowrie, about which I’ve talked in a previous post. Cowrie, in turn, is maintained by Michel Oosterhof, with whom I really had the pleasure of working these past months. Whew, that was a mouthful of links, but I’ve got my references done with for now… I have talked about the experience in the official report, so this post will focus a bit more on the technical challenges I faced and my main takeaways, as well as serving to showcase the new features that have been added.
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image from Cowrie Honeypot

Cowrie Honeypot

Since summer 2014 I’ve been working on extensions and contributions to the well known Kippo honeypot developed by desaster. I noticed some SSH attacks against my systems were not logged in full detail and I started to work on additional logging, from there I’ve added ‘ssh exec commands’ support, SFTP support, SCP support, direct-tcpip (proxying) support and many other features. To distinguish this from the original software, I have now renamed the system to "Cowrie".
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image from Interesting Perl scripts through stdin

Interesting Perl scripts through stdin

This came in recently in one of my honeypots, same IP address that attempted to download SSH bruteforcing scripts before, but this latest attempt shows a new method of operations. In the log below you can see they attempt to run ‘perl’. Kippo accepts the perl command, but we don’t see what’s executed. 2015-02-17 08:13:56+0000 [kippo.core.ssh.HoneyPotSSHFactory] New connection: AAA.BBB.CCC.DDD:40346 (127.0.0.1:2222) [session: 491] 2015-02-17 08:13:57+0000 [HoneyPotTransport,491,AAA.BBB.CCC.DDD] KEXINIT: client supported key exchange: ['diffie-hellman-group14-sha1', 'diffie-hellman-group-exchange-sha1', 'diffie-hellman -group1-sha1'] 2015-02-17 08:13:57+0000 [HoneyPotTransport,491,AAA.
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