productions. So we install them in the file system of
the LXC-based virtual machine. After that, we can
quickly and largely deploy the distributed LXC-
based virtual honeypots.
For evaluation of the proposed development tool
VNX, we recorded the performance data when we
implemented the deployment. The system
parameters of the host node were: CPU, 4 Intel(R)
Core(TM) i5-3470 CPU @ 3.20GHz; RAM, 16GB;
OS, Ubuntu 13.10; Kernel, Linux 3.11.0-26-generic.
We took five parameters into account to evaluate the
performance: RES (Physical memory used from the
process), VIRT (Virtual memory used by the
process), %CPU (The percentage of CPU used by
the process), %MEM (The percentage of RAM used
by the process), TIME+ (The total time of active of
this process).
We deployed 10 honeypots on a DMZ subnet
alongside a target network. The host system
launched 10 processes, and each process
corresponding to each honeypots. We recorded the
largest value among these 10 processes with those
five parameters, and the results were: TIME+, 1:08;
RES, 206m; VIRT, 864m; %CPU, 118; %MEM 1.3.
The total time for starting up 10 honeypots is less
than 5 minutes. But it is a long delay for intrusion
traffic redirection into the honeypots. Thus, it is
better to keep the high-interaction honeypots
running when the redirected intrusion traffics come.
Nevertheless, when we deployed ten LXC-based
virtual honeypots, the values of these five
parameters were: TIME+, 0:00.68; RES, 37m;
VIRT, 168m; %CPU, 22.5; %MEM, 0.2. Form this
result, we found that the startup delay of LCX-based
virtual honeypots was very short, less than 1 second
for 10 virtual honeypots to boot up, and the resource
occupation was also quite little. So, if the fidelity of
the virtual honeynet is not the most important
consideration, for the large-scale virtual honeypots
deployment and immediate intrusion response by
interesting traffics redirection, the LXC-based
virtual honeypots is the better choice.
5 CONCLUSIONS
In this paper, a new approach for the creation and
management of honeynets based on the use of a
technology independent honeynet description
language has been presented. The language is a CIM
like flexible language designed to describe
honeynets, with a simple syntax easy to understand.
It takes into account the characteristics and the
special requirements of Honeynets. Besides, a
flexible virtual honeynet tool named HoneyGen that
uses the specification language to create and modify
honeynets has been developed as a tool to validate
all the ideas presented. The results of the
experiments made show that the HoneyGen can be
used to quickly and flexibly deploy virtual
Honeynets based on two different deployment
platforms: VNX and Honeyd.
For the future work, there are plans to extend the
HoneyGen tool to other deployment platforms like
cloud infrastructures management tools, to study the
automatic model-driven based translation process
and to employ this approach in some real security
project and deploy the honeynet in some production
network to investigate network intrusion.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This work is funded by the Spanish MICINN
(project RECLAMO, Virtual and Collaborative
Honeynets based on Trust Management and
Autonomous Systems applied to Intrusion
Management, with code TIN2011-28287-C02-01.
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