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Build A Darknet To Capture Naughty Traffic
DM_NeoFLeX writes "Have some routable Address Space lying around? You might want to build a DarkNet. The folks over at Team Cymru have outlined instructions for creating one with FreeBSD and as little as /32 routable space. From the article: 'A Darknet is a portion of routed, allocated IP space in which no active services or servers reside. These are 'dark' because there is, seemingly, nothing within these networks. Any packet that enters a Darknet is by its presence Aberrant.' Darknets can provide useful information for tracking the flow of naughty network traffic."
Embrace the power of the darknet.
"Would you, could you, with a goat?" Dr Seuss
The comments that follow are time-stamped proof of what you were all doing during working hours...
I thought that California had the market cornered on this during the energy crisis...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Just as Luke Skywalker defeated Vader and the Darkside, the Lightnet led by the valiant hero Mr. Anonymous Coward PhD will vanquish the villianous foe known as Darknet.
darknet n. The collection of networks and other technologies that enable people to illegally share copyrighted digital files with little or no fear of detection.a sp
http://www.wordspy.com/words/darknet.
How do you track so called "naughty network traffic" when it goes to an IP with no services or servers? I guess you could do this with somthing along the lines of a "border" firewall (rather then a NAT system). But few of us have such a setup.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
It would seem like a good idea to use the info collected by the Darknet to perhaps automatically blacklist those offending IP addresses or perhaps to automatically complain to the offending ISP.
What is the difference between darknet and a sniffer? I would RTFA, but /.ed already
This sig is definitive. Reality is frequently inaccurate.
Does this mean Darknets are for pr0n?
<jedi> There is something funny here. You laugh. </jedi>
The Juniper (NetScreen/OneSecure) IDP has done a similar thing for years now.
You can assign it any IP and port combination, and it will ACK for any SYN's sent to it, whether there's a real server running on that IP or not. Such 'unsolicited' connections are a bad-traffic giveaway.
-AutoNiN
These are 'dark' because there is, seemingly, nothing within these networks. Any packet that enters a Darknet is by its presence Aberrant.
That's like the mailman trying to deliver letters to Santa Claus, or somebody addressing a letter wrong, thank good I know all those letters are Abberant now.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
and you can bet your bippy (who really knows what that means anyway) that we get kicked out of school if caught looking a things we oughtn't be.
I signed this
Come to the Darknet, little cracker; you know you want to.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
It's like a honeypot, except designed to catch worms, rather than live hacking attempts. Hell this could be extended with fake entries in a corporate address book to monitor worms that spread via e-mail communication.
I like the idea, and wish I had the corporate status to consider an implementation at my company.
I want an IP in the darknet!
I can hear the cry of the children everywhere!
Oh yeah! and whats an IP?
The Box is Open
Ok, it's a really good idea, but catching the naughty traffic isnt the hard part, what does it do witht he naughty traffic it gets, just make a pretty graph?
"Pushing little children, with their fully automatics, they like to push the weak around"
I have read thousands of Slash posts, and I promise you that being funny has never been a problem.
Seriously. I've read Dilbert and User Friendly, and what passes for +1 Funny with you folks isn't. It's complaining with community tech jargon thrown in, or it's complaining, or it's misuse of community jargon by outsiders.
I'm not the only one who's made this observation. You guys need a serious humor overhaul. Look to some humor sources from better-adjusted people to fully understand your problem.
LOL, I hate Monday too, John Arbuckle. Let's see what ole Marmaduke's up to.
The analysis of the Witty worm (discussed on /. here ) used a massive darknet subtending 1/256 of the entire IPv4 address space. This gave them an excellent sample size for analyzing the behavior of the worm.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Somehow I doubt ARIN and IANA will like this.
Sounds like a standard HoneyPot, except the only machine on the nextwork segement is a packet sniffer, so the address doesn't have any real destinations.. Not a big deal. I'm sure the honeynet people have done similar.
-molo
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
A sniffer will sniff all traffic on the wire for malicious activity, where as this, since there is no reason for any traffic to be directed at these addresses or routed to that subnet, you know immediately something is up.
If it seems like you've heard it before, you probably have, its similar if not the same thing to a honeypot/net.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
/32 is the network filter. That means all you need is a single ip address dumbass
a /32 block is a single machine.
Using dark ip space, bogon space and so on for blackhole network monitoring has been in use for a while to help detect DDoS's and even network worms. Jose Nazario has written quite thoroughly and extensively about their usage in his book, Defense and Detection Strategies against Internet Worms. Check it out if this interests you.
An interesting use of a darknet would be to shield a real server from unwanted attacks. Have the darknet relate any internet IPs that contact the darknet to your real server to ignore.
As an example. Setup a darknet on the following IPs:
DARK_A : 204.210.34.1
DARK_B : 204.210.34.3
Setup the real server mathematically between the two darknet IP addresses:
REAL : 204.210.34.2
Now have DARK_A & DARK_B contact REAL whenever DARK_A or DARK_B receive any packets. REAL can be setup to, on the fly, filter out any packets received from the same source as the DARK servers reported.
In a sense you're creating a realtime blacklist. You can set the list on a timed delay to expire. Or even filter out specific packet signatures instead of entire suspect IP addresses.
just a thought...
Joseph Elwell
I have a whole list of bookmarks for my naughty traffic.
Seriously, though... I have a spare wireless router set up at work that's easily hacked, easily found, and logs every damn thing that touches it. Our real wireless network is obscured, encrypted, mac filtered, etc. I realize it's not technically the same thing as the post describes (I guess you'd call it a honeypot network or something) but it's the same idea.
Of course, nobody will care if a hacker makes his way into our network (honeypot or not) unless he does some "damage."
Hey! Who knew that the net was missing?
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
like anyone here as a /32 ip block
/32 block, I do, and so does everyone else here. A /32 block is a single ip address. People with DSL connections, who get more than 1 ip allocated, are perfect candadites. I can even get additional ip's from my cable company, on request, for no additional charge (at least that was the case about a year ago, I heard they charge like 3 bucks a month now).
Maybe you should have learned networking before posting that. You have a
bash: rtfm: command not found
What's the difference between a darknet and a honeypot/net setup? Both seem to have the same goals, and both use some IP space to detect potential attacks.
who saw their web site and was transported back to 1996? I half expected a looping MIDI background song, and a request for some obscure, obsolete plugin, or maybe a Netscape 3 Now! button.
Seriously, if anyone from there is reading this, ditch the ugly background image, and get some up to date design!. Sheesh. Just like a Welshman to have an ugly webpage.
...there are easier ways of finding Pr0n aren't there? Like opening up your spam folder :-)
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
a
A
sig?
But why do I keep getting packets from Microsoft?
If you find this post offensive, don't read it! THINK ABOUT YOUR BREATHING! I am what I am because of how apes behave.
The idea here is to catch traffic to otherwise unused network addresses. This does not require any of the stuff that seems to be implied here.
For example, say you have a Linux system in a colo somewhere (or on the end of a T-1 or some other >1 IP address static network). You have some IP addresses assigned to you that are otherwise not assigned. Here is how you can get all of the darknet functionality with your standard server.
Some example numbers (none of which are real)
Unused address to watch: 10.11.12.13
Interface on which you receive traffic: eth0
A fake interface to route to: tap0
Configure your server to ARP the extra addresses:
arp -Ds 10.11.12.13 eth0 -i eth0 pub
Setup a "tap" device to route the traffic to
tunctl -u nobody -t tap0
ifconfig tap0 10.11.12.13 netmask 255.255.255.0 broadcast 10.11.12.255 up
Setup a "route" to the device
ip route add 10.11.12.13 dev tap0
At this point the traffic should all route to the fake device tap0. You can run tcpdump on this, setup IP filter chains, run MRTG on it directly, etc. All without any extra hardware.
For those that work with UML (User Mode Linux), you already recognize this is exactly how you setup virtual UML networks.
This is also somewhat related to "tar pits" that just answer connect requests to addresses that have un-completed ARP requests.
Have fun.
I thought that Darknet was that new, badly named interacial pr0n site.
Damn those spamming bastards. Take my $49.99 will they?!
These things have been around for awhile, but known as Network Telescopes. The largest (AFAIK) is at UCSD, which is just a tad larger than a /32 (like, say, a /8). They collected some interesting data off the thing during all the Blaster rampages (Google cache of HTML'ed PDF here).
Also, see the NANOG guide to setting them up here, and the home for the CAIDA/UCSD telescope here.
So in short, nice job to the Welsh for implementing it, but there's bigger elsewhere for y'all to play with.
Cue The Sun...
Naughty will always triumph over good because good is dumb!
Oh I'll show you Post-Grad at brown you school hopping feind!
Like, traffic that didn't pay it's taxes or something?
Get paid to search..It's geniune and
Well, yes it's 10.0.0.0
but I control it...and that's what's important.
Ok, well...yes, I only control it on my side of the router...
sniff...nevermind
How is this different than what Lance and the Honeynet ( http://project.honeynet.org ) team are doing?
"Omnis tuus capsa sunt inesse nos"
It's got the info it needs, and that's all. Must be a member of the Bandwidth Conservation Society. Fine with me.
Wouldn't this be impossible to create with IPv6? Because of the *huge* address space and the negligible probability of a packet entering a darknet?
This is in no way an argument against IPv6, I'm eagerly awaiting it - I'm just curious...
Question: Why should i believe anything a post at -1 has to say about good karma?
And the l33t shall inherit the 34r7h.
I would definitely recommend trying this sometime, if you don't have a great router (like I do at home *kicks his netgear*) then you can use something like this to watch things, you never know what kind of interesting things you might find (worms anyone?) I've actually found a few odd things using this, such as a windows worm on one of my Windows boxes that I wasn't aware of and that was scanning my whole network. So consider using one of these, you never know what you might find. And kudos on the directions, they are very well done.
Sounds cool, but I wonder what the FEDS would think.
Since the honeynet was borderline illegal depending on how you set it up(interception of communications is a federal crime) this could also fit that bill.
Well, you see things change, and now the grandparent post is sitting pretty at +5 interesting, while you're still kicking your heels at 1.
That in itself is pretty funny.
Santa Claus
North Pole, Canada
H0H 0H0
If you write Santa at this address, he will write back. Not 100% sure USPS will send it over the border, but if they do, it'll work.
( Canada Post sends out replies to children each year; I think employees at the post office volunteer and take the time to hand-craft a personal reply to each and every letter, though they may be auto-generated nowadays, i am not certain ).
routable or not, /32 is a single ip address.
192.168.1.23/32 is still an ip address.
Actually, when it only covers a /32 (one IP address) it sounds a lot like a Goober With Firewall. :)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
I dont have a /32 you insensitive clod, I access the web over internal proxy. No direct external access.
...is the uptime, no one can make it beyond 99 minutes!...
Sorry guys, couldn't resist...
OK, moderators. A sense of humor? Anyone?
Well, I guess you can't see it, but on my user page it says "Karma: Excellent" They could mod this one down to -1 it wouldn't matter. You really have to be a consistant ass for a long time to damage the karma.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Duh, Im NATed on an university and I DONT have a public IP. :)
Now when I type a wrong IP address, John Asscroft will be on my ass....
I have thought about this for a bit now.
You are right that this is unfair.
It is just ripe for abuse.
If you see something that you don't like at +4 Informative. Instead of modding it -1 Overrated which could later be removed in M2 you could mod it +1 funny and prevent any further karma increases for that user.
A few people with mod points could prop up posts they didn't like with +1 Funnys and mod them down until the account is basically muted as a Troll.
(This is made difficult by the current protections of limited and basically random gaining of mod points, but if you really had a grudge and a few friends you could do it.)
Now I know that the purpose of the +1 Funny != Karma restriction is to encourage serious useful discussion, but I think protections need to be put in place to prevent it's abuse.
One very simple way to do this is to make Funny moderations not count for the purpose of allowing further moderation.
So you could end up with posts marked +N Funny to an arbitrary value of N, while only allowing karma destructive mods to be applied if there was additional karma building moderations.
So if it is modded +3 Funny it can not be modded -4 Troll, but if it is at +3 Funny +1 UnderRated it could be modded to +2 Underated. (All this assumes it is posted at an initial value of 1 for a registered account.)
Frankly this is not the place to discuss this.
Slashdot has a feature request area that is the proper location for your complaint. You will have to register there to make the request, and I don't know what that entails, but if this is important to you then put forth the effort.
That's true. As a matter of fact I do happen to have an /32 ip block
("/32 routable space," if you will,
or a "Class D network"
with subnet mask no less than 255.255.255.255)
and also another /8 one--namely 127.0.0.0/8--a real Class A network
with subnet mask of 255.0.0.0,
i.e. all IP addresses from 127.0.0.1
up to 127.255.255.255,
exactly 16777215 (sic!) routable IP addresses,
which I proudly administer, and which happily
"capture naughty traffic" on a daily basis
(like there was no tomorrow, in fact)
thanks to images.google.com.
That is why I find this article especially interesting
and insightful.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
The thing is, if you don't find them funny/humorous then it's your problem, not theirs :)
It's also called a network telescope. CAIDA has been implementing this type of thing for several months.
would be a better name since HoneyPots have been discussed for quite some time. And they are probably a bit safer than HoneyPots from a legal perspective (probably less you can do than compromising a HoneyPot machine).
Down at SDSC they have a little less than 1% of ALL of the routable IP space dedicated to doing this stuff. They call it a network telescope, and use it to study DOS activity and stuff.
http://www.caida.org/analysis/security/telescop
"Inferring Internet Denial-of-Service Activity" [2001] is good reading.
I completely agree, after spending countless hours sifting through log files, tweaking triggers to help reduce the amount of false positives, the IDS is not the complete answer.
An IDS is only so efficient, you need to first really understand your network before deploying, and even after deployment, this is only the beginning.
We have been using Darknets, or honeypots for sometime, an excellent combination of tools, see Snort, ACID (Analysis Console for Intrusion Databases
As said before and in the article, this is a sophisticated set of tools and you need to understand your network, or you will find yourself chasing ghosts, Enter the Darknet (Honeypot).
Combined with the other tools, we have been using Honeyd , an excellent honeypot, simple to get up an going and very configurable.
Snort.org has an excellent howto documentation to get the IDS up an going, then you can add the honeypot.
It can be downright humorous how quickly you will begin to capture useful information. In addition, adding scripts to interact with the traffic will allow you to keep the user busy while you are collecting data, or Tarpitting the traffic making the port "sticky" dragging the connections, another good one would be LeBrea.
If you have any interest in network security, or simply want to monitor your home network, you need to take a look at darknet, or any of the other tools mentioned.
In Soviet Russia, the Darknet scans you.
I've got a /666 block. It's a devil to manage.
Whenever you read this sig someone's refrigerator light turns on.
All your data packets are belong to us!
Please tell me you're not comparing User Friendly to Dilbert. UF is the same old tedious shit, over and over and over again...
This is just like this issue of.
Weird.
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
How else would pidgeons be able to carry them? RFC 2549
Or at least, it's only really client-server in passive mode. The rest of the time, it's two servers talking to each other in the dumbest, most broken way imaginable.
(And if you have no idea what I'm talking about, examine the mechanics of the PORT command. And understand why firewall designers the world over just wish everybody would switch to WebDAV over HTTPS, or sftp, or some other equivalent, so we could pretend FTP never existed.)
my old sig used to be funny, but then slashcode ate it and now it's not funny anymore
I've got a /666 block. It's a devil to manage.
Ya know, I have seen some pretty bad stuff on slashdot. But, I gotta say man, that takes the cake. That was lame on all fronts that I know of, and I just discovered like 8 more levels of lameness just from that post. Pardon me while I go reexamine all that is good in this universe, my faith is severely shaken.
But...but...
Bill Gates is a borg! It is funny because he wants to assimilate us all with his nefarious popular operating system!
Don't you get it!
Hey freaks: now you're ju
I thought it was a daemon to manage?
Sapere aude!
just another excuse for sysadmins everywhere to amass large quantities of pr0n in a short period of time ...
Yes, I run something like this on a couple of /16's ...
Darknetting/Honeynetting works well as part of your security systems, if implemented intelligently.
We moderators do not have a sense of humor that we are aware of.
I think we should punish people no matter what they do. It's fun!
A darknet is just one tool that is useful in a Service Provider environment, this presentation contains a lot more (BGP, honeypots, worm and DDoS detection, etc):
PDF
PPT
Maybe you should have learned networking yourself. A /32 mask means that all 32 bits are part of the network and subnet addresses, leaving... 0 bits for hosts!
/32 mask is meaningless. The largest mask you can have, leaving two addresses, (one for each end of a point-to-point link) is /30.
A
shut the fuck up
Slow Down Cowboy! Slashdot requires you to wait 20 seconds between hitting 'reply' and submitting a comment. It's been 19 seconds since you hit 'reply'. Chances are, you're behind a firewall or proxy, or clicked the Back button to accidentally reuse a form. Please try again. If the problem persists, and all other options have been tried, contact the site administrator[fat fuck cowboi kneel].
Slap it on the nose with a newspaper and say, "Bad! Bad packet!"?
it would be a trap net. If anything were to wander it's way, it'd be logged, and investigated. Anything that regularly scrubs the internet will trip on one of these addresses, sooner or later. Hopefully... if the trap addresses are actually spread around, and not just in the same basic network address...
:)
Hmm... I wonder what'll happen when googlebot drops by for a visit...
I have one IP address that runs a FreeBSD 4.10 WWW and FTP server. Basically any traffic for other ports is "naughty", and I get plenty of it. So much so that the I had to patch the ipfw2 PR where the default log limit cap wasn't working. The SMB ports usually hit the limit first, then the deny all rule at the bottom.
Also any anonymous FTP attempt is considered "naughty" as I don't do anonymous, nor do I advertise FTP anywhere. No domain name like ftp.foo.com, or ftp URIs to the IP address. So there is no reason, other than port scans for that traffic. Occasionally I look at the logs and e-mail ISPs of the more persistent probers. But mostly I just shake my head, and worry about my parents AOL dial up XP box.
And I'm sure I could do something with some of those ugly URLs my Apache server laughs at. Anyone got a good Apache2 module that emulates the IIS bugs to honeypot an attacker? That might be amusing.
More than a decade ago we built a "darknet" out of several unused class A addresses which we had access at the time. This was an experiment and we coordinated with the right network operators and funding agencies to make it all right. All networks were routed to our capture network containing only a packet sniffer. We kept the network in place for a month. The result: an amazing variety of "broken packets" which one Internet guru dubbed "bogons" arived at a low but constant rate. The three class A networks allowed us to see effects across part of the network address "spectrum:" we noticed, for example, that some bogons from the same host showed up on all three networks, spreading broken packets across the address space! We traced many bogons to bad UNIX ports and could, in some cases, locate the specific porting error responsible. Big and little endian problems accounted for many. A lot of people ran these broken ports and, due to the random luck of their address assignment, the port generated orphaned bogons onto our three class A networks. and hence to our darknet. One day we captured bogons containing commands for a distributed database. We traced it to a development lab run by a large computer manufacturer who thought no one knew that they were working on a new distributed database product. We were able to discover the origin and cause of many bogons, however, in the majority of cases we could not establish the bogon's cause or its origin. Our "darknet" experience showed a constant low level chatter of bogons througout the Internet. There are no "silent" slots in the address space, unused, where no one routes traffic. Unexpected things arrive and await discovery.
D'oh! At first I wondered why /. was posting about capturing naughty pictures by using driftnet with webcollage.
I tried this once but my screen's too visible to my boss whenever he snoopes around the cubefarm. The first porn pic I saw I decided I'd better shut webcollage down.
I'm glad someone's having fun. But they're either braver or dumber than me
Come play free flash games on Kongregate!
Granted, there's a lot of garbage (redundant Cowboy Neal / insensitive clod comments), but the discussions typically veer wildly off-topic and are frequently hilarious.
Why don't you stop trolling and your karma will be fine. It very easy to get karma here. Anyone who whines about losing karma isn't the kind of person I want commenting.
If you had any guts, you'd whine in your journal. Then people could see your comments and explain why you're being a troll.
Also, you're increasing the overhead by requiring the packet filter to read the content of packets, instead of just their headers. That means slower throughput, especially when dealing with large networks.
And finally: FTP's the only protocol designed in this ultra-stupid way in the history of IP. FTP is so obviously a relic from the days when .edu was the dominant TLD in other ways, too, like cleartext passwords (ugh).
my old sig used to be funny, but then slashcode ate it and now it's not funny anymore
How does this differ from a honey pot?
There's no shame in being a pariah. -Marge Simpson
Scratch that I meant honey net
There's no shame in being a pariah. -Marge Simpson
You're forgetting who the audience is. Dilbert, etc. are more for the general public, while /. humor is intended for the crowd who cares to waste time reading comments on a certain niche blog/news site called, "Slashdot. News for Nerds. Stuff that matters." Read the name of the site again and realize where you are. See the difference? This is a community of mostly nerds who not only know what AYBABTU stands for, but what its origins are. People who think Marmaduke is funny are not expected to laugh at--or even understand--/. humor. Look elsewhere for the tired ole (sic) complaining about Mondays, my kids made a mess again ha ha, etc. If you understood the language and culture here, you'd see how wickedly funny some of the comments are.
Just a morality crisis with Enron whores raping grandma of her pension money. http://www.sundayherald.com/42433 Enjoy.
This ain't no upwardly mobile freeway This is the road to hell
This could be a useful tool if it were added to an Anti-virus program. The AV software could track known portions of the DarkNet, especially behind a Router, and wait for any process to fire off at part of the Dark - if it does, prompt to kill it, or just kill it, depending on a user pref.
Many many viruses prefer random blasting to IPs, even some who mix that with IP collection. It would catch a lot of viruses in the act - partly because a virus would have to be that much more complex, that it would have to have a reliable way of collecting good IPs before attempting to spread.
McAfee? Symantec? Are you listening? Add this instead of big heavy overreaching scans that crash apps. Are you there?
The Cymru Darknet is something entirely different, and it's not a honeynet either. Honeynets are nice sticky traps waiting to snare actively attacking crackers. This Darknet is primarily a passive monitoring system, and while it will see some active attacks such as port scans, another interesting thing it sees is backscatter from forged traffic, like CAIDA's System is tracking. Many DOS attacks use spoofed packets from random addresses, such as ICMP or SYN floods, and the victims or some routers will send TCP ACKs or ICMP responses back to the (forged) source, and some proportional fraction of that will end up in your darknet's detectors. It won't catch all such attacks - ISPs that want to be good citizens run the RFC2267 / RFC2827 best practices like uRPF spoof-proofing, which prevent their customers from forging packets except from the forger's own subnet address space, so you won't see those, but they're usually much less of a problem because they're easier to block, trace, and shut down. (Some of the cracker tools out there have built-in options to only forge within your /24 for just this reason.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
So if there are ostensibly no servers or workstations in this submet and it vacuums up all traffic, then it's more of a Blackhole Net. A Honeynet is designed to have fake info and traffic to lure in the hungry cracker, a P2P net is designed to easily share info, the Internet is apperently very good at hooking disparet networks (or spreading penis enlargement pills, no that's my email), and sneaker net is running floppies between computers to share info.
Blackhole Net, where the packets get in, but they don't get out!
--Somewhere there is a village missing an idiot.