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Enhancing the efficiency of IDS system with Honey pot placement in
Network Architecture
Vijay K. Chaurasiya1, Ashish Srivastava2 Shuchi Chandra3Shashank Srivastava4, Sandeep Saxena5, Manish Rai6,
IIIT-Allahabad, India

The Intrusion Detection System specially involves two
types of techniques: Anomaly Detection involving the
Abstract -- Increasing technology space has pressurized the detection based on behavior/heuristic rules and Misuse
orgainsational enviroment to safegraurd its network from Detection involving the detection based on patterns and
outside as well as inside attack. Any malicious intrusion can signatures. Anomaly detection lags behind as it requires
dragdown a highly reputed organisation to the floors of
too much time to detect the behavior and Misuse
defamation and even insolvency. Henceforth network
Detection lags behind for detection of new attack
security is one of the biggest challenge for organisation.
Although traditional concepts of firewall and intrusion signature. So Honeypot is used as a tool to support the
detction system is prevailing yet there is a need to secure the technique of Misuse Detection so that new attacks can be
enviroment from the so called zero day attacks. Attackers detected before they can harm internal network and the
every now and then generate exploits to penetrate the secure signature can be framed in the IDS to defend the network
network enviroment and the existing known signatures are from internal and external threat of such attack in future.
not able to detect such an attack. This paper brings forth the
concept of deployment of honeypot so as to make the IDS Honeypots are Bait Servers which are not the part of any
system more effective and efficient for the zero day attack production server in the organization and are just placed
leading to least penetration to the network enviroment. This isolated so as to attract the attackers to plug and play with
paper lays down a new network architecture so that the IDS
it and at its end it logs all the actions of the attacker so
system can be updated with the latest attack scenarios. The
that it can be analyzed further to generate signatures for
aforesaid objective is achived with the help of establishment
of honeypot. Later tcpdump is used for he further analysis of
IDS. Attackers before making an attack performs a ping
payload so as to generate alert signautre in IDS(Snort v2.0). sweep and if the honeypot is pinged. As the request
reaches the honeypot server it records all the activities,
even the keystrokes typed by the attackers so every
command entered by the attacker becomes a part of log to
I. INTRODUCTION the honeypot server. It also stores all tools used by the
intruders in records as a forensic machine.

The high use of internet in today’s IT world has purged in The given paper describes how the data returned from the
the concept of security deployment in the organization so honeypot server is used to write custom IDS rules. Thus
as to make it almost immune to various upcoming attack new network architecture is designed to collect the
scenarios. One of the critical areas is the protection of response to write custom IDS rules by seeing the data
internal network from new attacks. Although the most payload and writing the rules matching the payload.
desirable is the deployment of intrusion and prevention
system in the network architecture but this system is still II. RELATED WORK
vulnerable to zero day attacks. The IDS generally
includes signatures for known attacks and generates the
alerts for the same but if any new attack penetrates the One of the drawback stumble upon with network intrusion
system then it lacks behind. To deal with this problem the detection systems is that the logging of failed connection
concept of honeypot can be used along with any packet attempts just occurs when services are not listening on a
analyzing tool so as to generate signatures for zero-day scanned port. When a RST signal terminates a TCP
attacks in IDS. connection attempt, the system never logs the data packet
that the remote machine was trying to send into the
network. A honeypot as a one of the greatest security tool

suggests a mechanism by completing the connection
attempt and providing an attacker a false illusion of
accessing the critical servers and then recording the
interactions between the honeypot and the remote
machine.

Honeypot placement is one of the greatest issues to be
taken care of to optimize the efficiency of the
implemented Intrusion Detection System. Various
network architectures are presented till now to achieve the
aforesaid motive but the basic idea behind this as we
suppose is detection of hackers scripts and actions to
penetrate into the system and henceforth the proposed
architecture is presented which will help the
organizational security to build up patches for the existing
loophole and make their system robust and stringent to
attack scenarios.

III. PROPOSED DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION
Fig 1.1 Deployment of IDS & honeypot in the LAN Architecture

In this configuration, main network is a “TCP/IP based
In this section we outline the requirements of the network” which contains clients and servers. Snort 2.0 is
proposed infrastructure which is considered as a solution used as IDS and is capable to be configured with server.
to decrease the malicious inflow of packets in the Honeyd is a honeypot system that is configured as a
organizational environment and enhance the efficiency of separate server and is connected to the main server. We
IDS system deployed. assume a”switched network” in our approach, with a
configurable switch which is connected to the main server
The real honeypot server is used to safeguard the main and the respective clients. As the LAN architecture is
server from if the hacker is able to compromise the developed in within a primary network henceforth the
honeypot server. Although it is hard to implement the real server is supported with two Ethernet cards eth0 and eth1.
honeypot but it is desirable for large organizations as such Eth0 directs the internet connection to the main sever and
servers do not hamper the production process in the eth1 manages the intranet traffic within the private LAN
organization and only IT staff is able to access the 192.168.0.1.
required logs. Neither the attacker nor the organizational The attacker first performs a ping sweep attack to detect
staff knows where honeypot is placed. the available servers in the network and the honeypot
server entices him to perform attacks to penetrate the
The given network architecture is used to develop an network. Once the requests are directed to the honeypot
understanding as to why and how honeypots are used to server the incoming connection is established with the
enhance the work of IDS system. attacking system. As the attacker gets a feel of entering
into the server it performs all his efforts to penetrate into
different servers. Honeypot gives him the illusion of
different servers and constantly interacts with him to
record his activities and send the specific response to the
syslog server for future analysis and investigation.

IV. EXPERIMENTAL SETUP %01/..%01/..%01/..%01/..%01/..%01/..%0
1/..%01/..%01/..%01/.
To implement honeypot an additional tool Arpd is .%01/..%01/..%01/..%01/..%01/..%01/..%
embedded in it. Honeypot cannot do everything alone and 01/..%01/..%01/..%01/
..%01/..%01/..%01/..%01/..%01/..%01/..
requires the help of Arpd. Arpd is used for ARP spoofing; %01/..%01/..%01/..%01
this is what actually monitors the unused IP space and /..%01/..%01/..%01/..%01/..%01/..%01/.
directs the attacks to the honeypot. Honeyd is only able to .%01/..%01/..%01/..%0
interact with attackers. For example if the aim is to 1/..%01/..%01/..%01/..%01/..%01//etc/s
monitor all the unused IPs in the 192.168.1.0/24 network, hadow HTTP/1.1
the required commands to start both Arpd and Honeyd are Host: 202.174.22.145:10000
as follows:
It is visible that the attacking port is 10000 thus port
10000 is of interest. The various ip addresses from where
arpd 192.168.0.1/24
such request came can be filtered using tcpdump analysis.
honeyd -p nmap.prints -f honeyd.conf
192.168.0.1/24

Based on the commands, the Arpd process monitors the B. Results and Discussion
unused IPs, directs all corresponding attacks to the
honeyd and spoofs the victim’s IP address with the MAC Once the analysis is done now it is the time to write the
address of the honeypot. For the honeyd command –p snort rule. By the analysis of the payload it is visible that
nmap.prints refers to the nmap fingerprint database and -f the string started with “GET/unauthenticated/”
honeyd.conf is the honeyd configuration file. thus following snort rule can be set:

Once the installation is honeypot server is completed the alert tcp $EXTERNAL_NET any ->
traffic directed to honeypot server is dumped o other $192.168.0.1 10000 (content:"GET /unauthenticated/";
system using packet analyzing tool tcpdump with the help msg:"Get unauthenticated";)
of following command:
tcpdump -nn -x -s 1500 host
192.168.0.145 -w store.cap
Now any attack coming from the specified port will
The tcpdump command will dump all the malicious generate the alert to the administrator of penetration for
packets directed to the honeypot and hence will help in unauthorized access in the network environment by the
writing the snort rule set by analyzing the payload. attacker.

If the set rule has to be further customized then the
A. Writing of Snort Rules: following payload can be added:

alert tcp any any -> any 10000
Penetrating in the network to gain access by getting the (content:"GET /unauthenticated/..%01/..%01/"; msg:"Get
etc/passwd file in the Linux environment or the password unauthenticated";)
shadow file i.e. etc/shadow which contains the username
The point of concern here is that adding too much of
and password of all users. No such rule is defined in the payload may result in false negatives which will overall
latest snort rule set. Suppose you get the following log lower down the implementation of snort in organizational
generated in honeypot: network.

# cat 44F75D6380122.shell
:::::::::::::: V. CONCLUSION
GET/unauthenticated/..%01/..%01/..%01/
..%01/..%01/..%01/..%
The Intrusion detection system can only give the optimum
01/..%01/..%01/..%01/..%01/..%01/..%01
/..%01/..%01/..%01/.. benefit if it is also able to detect those attacks for which

signatures are not defined in its database. The area of
work will be to give attention to this Snort limitation and
thus increasing the scalability and responsiveness of the
system towards the various types of attacks so as to
achieve the motto of building a smart agile and secure
system to face the new challenges of technological arena.
Though honeypot deployment is a cost-effective solution
for the security of large organization but in future
refinement is required to elimination false alarm
generations.

REFERENCES

1. Vidar Ajaxon Grønland: Building IDS signatures
by means of a honeypot Norwegian Information
system Laboratory.
2. Chi-Hung Chi , Ming Li Dongxi Liu : A method
to obtain Signatures From Honeypots Data,
School of Computing National University of
Singapore
3. Babak Khosravifar, Jamal Bentahar: An
Experience Improving Intrusion Detection
Systems False Alarm Ratio by Using Honeypot.
Department of Electrical and Computer
Engineering, Concordia University
4. Greg M. Bednarski and Jake Branson:
Understanding Network Threats through
Honeypot Deployment, Carnegie Mellon
University March 2004.
5. Richard Hammer : Enhancing IDS using, Tiny
Honeypot SANS Institute InfoSec Reading
Room
6. Solution Base: What you need to know about
honeypots
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