HoneyDOC: An Efficient Honeypot Architecture Enabling All-Round Design

Abstract: Honeypots are designed to trap the attacker with the purpose of investigating its malicious behavior. Owing to the increasing variety and sophistication of cyber attacks, how to capture high-quality attack data has become a challenge in the context of honeypot area. All-round honeypots, which mean significant improvement in sensibility, countermeasure and stealth, are necessary to tackle the problem. In this paper, we propose a novel honeypot architecture termed HoneyDOC to support all-round honeypot design and implementation. Our HoneyDOC architecture clearly identifies three essential independent and collaborative modules, Decoy, Captor and Orchestrator. Based on the efficient architecture, a Software-Defined Networking (SDN) enabled honeypot system is designed, which supplies high programmability for technically sustaining the features for capturing high-quality data. A proof-of-concept system is implemented to validate its feasibility and effectiveness. The experimental results show the benefits by using the proposed architecture comparing to the previous honeypot solutions.