Cowrie

Welcome to the Cowrie GitHub repository

This is the official repository for the Cowrie SSH and Telnet Honeypot effort.

What is Cowrie

Cowrie is a medium to high interaction SSH and Telnet honeypot designed to log brute force attacks and the shell interaction performed by the attacker. In medium interaction mode (shell) it emulates a UNIX system in Python, in high interaction mode (proxy) it functions as an SSH and telnet proxy to observe attacker behavior to another system.

Cowrie is maintained by Michel Oosterhof.

Documentation

The Documentation can be found here.

Slack

You can join the Cowrie community at the following Slack workspace.

Features

  • Choose to run as an emulated shell (default):

    • 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

    • Cowrie saves files downloaded with wget/curl or uploaded with SFTP and scp for later inspection

  • Or proxy SSH and telnet to another system

    • Run as a pure telnet and ssh proxy with monitoring

    • Or let Cowrie manage a pool of QEMU emulated servers to provide the systems to login to

For both settings:

  • Session logs are stored in an UML Compatible format for easy replay with the bin/playlog utility.

  • SFTP and SCP support for file upload

  • Support for SSH exec commands

  • Logging of direct-tcp connection attempts (ssh proxying)

  • Forward SMTP connections to SMTP Honeypot (e.g. mailoney)

  • JSON logging for easy processing in log management solutions

Docker

Docker images are available on Docker Hub.

  • To get started quickly and give Cowrie a try, run:

    $ docker run -p 2222:2222 cowrie/cowrie:latest
$ ssh -p 2222 root@localhost

For more detailed instructions on using Docker in Cowrie, check Building Docker Images

Requirements

Software required to run locally:

  • Python 3.9+

  • python-virtualenv

For Python dependencies, see requirements.txt.

Files of interest:

  • etc/cowrie.cfg - Cowrie’s configuration file.

  • etc/cowrie.cfg.dist - default settings, don’t change this file

  • etc/userdb.txt - credentials to access the honeypot

  • src/cowrie/data/fs.pickle - fake filesystem, this only contains metadata (path, uid, gid, size)

  • honeyfs/ - contents for the fake filesystem

  • honeyfs/etc/issue.net - pre-login banner

  • honeyfs/etc/motd - post-login banner

  • src/cowrie/data/txtcmds/ - output for simple fake commands

  • var/log/cowrie/cowrie.json - audit output in JSON format

  • var/log/cowrie/cowrie.log - log/debug output

  • var/lib/cowrie/tty/ - session logs, replayable with the bin/playlog utility.

  • var/lib/cowrie/downloads/ - files transferred from the attacker to the honeypot are stored here

  • bin/createfs - create your own fake filesystem

  • bin/playlog - utility to replay session logs

Contributors

Many people have contributed to Cowrie over the years. Special thanks to:

  • Upi Tamminen (desaster) for all his work developing Kippo on which Cowrie was based

  • Dave Germiquet (davegermiquet) for TFTP support, unit tests, new process handling

  • Olivier Bilodeau (obilodeau) for Telnet support

  • Ivan Korolev (fe7ch) for many improvements over the years.

  • Florian Pelgrim (craneworks) for his work on code cleanup and Docker.

  • Guilherme Borges (sgtpepperpt) for SSH and telnet proxy (GSoC 2019)

  • And many many others.