Cowrie is a medium interaction SSH honeypot designed to log brute force attacks and, most importantly, the entire shell interaction performed by the attacker.

Kippo is directly based on [Kippo] by desaster (http://github.com/desaster/kippo/). Kippo is inspired, but not based on Kojoney.

Features

Some interesting features:

Fake filesystem with the ability to add/remove files. A full fake filesystem resembling a Debian 5.0 installation is included
Possibility of adding fake file contents so the attacker can 'cat' files such as /etc/passwd. Only minimal file contents are included
Session logs stored in an UML Compatible format for easy replay with original timings
Kippo saves files downloaded with wget/curl or uploaded with SFTP and scp for later inspection

Requirements

Software required:

An operating system (tested on Debian, CentOS, FreeBSD and Windows 7)
Python 2.5+
Twisted 8.0+
PyCrypto
pyasn1
Zope Interface

See Wiki for some installation instructions.

How to run it?

Edit cowrie.cfg to your liking and start the honeypot by running:

./start.sh

start.sh is a simple shell script that runs Cowrie in the background using twistd. Detailed startup options can be given by running twistd manually. For example, to run Cowrie in foreground:

twistd -y cowrie.tac -n

By default Cowrie listens for ssh connections on port 2222. You can change this, but do not change it to 22 as it requires root privileges. Use port forwarding instead. (More info: MakingKippoReachable).

Files of interest:

dl/ - files downloaded with wget are stored here
log/cowrie.log - log/debug output
log/cowrie.json - transaction output in JSON format
log/tty/ - session logs
utils/playlog.py - utility to replay session logs
utils/createfs.py - used to create fs.pickle
data/fs.pickle - fake filesystem
honeyfs/ - file contents for the fake filesystem - feel free to copy a real system here

Is it secure?

Maybe. See FAQ

I have some questions!

Please visit https://github.com/micheloosterhof/cowrie/issues