Collaborative Honeynet Threat Sharing Platform

Congratulations Dr. Charles Lim, Deputy Head Master of Information Technology Swiss German University. The APNIC Foundation has awarded Dr. Charles Lim at ISIF Asia 2022 Award during the Foundation session at APNIC54 in Singapore on Tuesday, 13 September 2022 for Honeynet’s cybersecurity project. The Honeynet Threat Sharing Platform is designed to collect, categorize, and distribute cybersecurity threat information from malicious traffic discovered in partner “honeypots” all around the world.

With the continuous rise of cyber security threats, monitoring security potential threats and attacks become essential to plan for cyber defense. Honeypot, a decoy system designed to lure attackers, has been used to track and learn attacker’s behavior. Collecting attacker’s interactions with honeypot at different locations inside different organization’s premises provide useful and more complete picture of the landscape of current cyber security threats. The log of the attacks to the honeypots become an essential cyber security threat information that could be shared to many of the security incident analysts at different organizations to provide relevant and contextual threat intelligence. The goal of this project is to develop and implement a collaborative honeynet threat sharing platform that could collect, store, add contextual information pertaining to the threat and share these threat information to the relevant organization. This project continues on the previous year project with additional type of honeypots are being added to the collection of honeypot sensors. In addition, new type of threat categories, threat purpose and threat phases are added to define more fine-grained secure shell (ssh) attacks seen in our honeypots. With the new public dashboard is now ready for public view, our hope is more organizations in Indonesia as well as organizations in ASEAN countries would be interested to participate in the project in a collaborative effort to share and exchange threat information, which potentially could be used as a cyber defense platform for each of the participating organizations.

The project achieved the following objectives:

1. Develop a collaborative repository platform for storing honeynet-based threat information. The project allows anyone or organization to participate in a community-based threat information sharing based on the honeynet system.  There are 4 honeypots currently implemented, i.e., cowrie, Dionaea, Elastichoney, and conpot.
2. Redesign and develop a more robust repository and visualization platform that allows security analysts to add and enrich existing security threat information with the results of the analysis of the security events or objects related to the events. The robust repository platform utilized the cluster database of MongoDB while the visualization platform also uses cluster setup to distribute search tasks over cluster servers, improving overall user experience of using the platform.
3. An enhanced platform that allows organizations to share and exchange security threat information with other organizations. The platform enables the threat information to be exchanged with the cyber security community through TAXII services in a standardized format or through open-source threat intelligence Malware Information Sharing Platform (MISP).

The project was lead by the Charles Lim, from Swiss German University (SGU) and builds on years of collaboration to support the Honeynet project Indonesia Chapter (IHP), in partnership with the Ministry of Communication and Informatics (KOMINFO) and Badan Siber & Sandi Negara (BSSN). It is also an expansion of a previous ISIF Asia grant allocated in 2019.

Source: ISIF ASIA