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 interaction SSH and Telnet honeypot designed to log brute force attacks and the shell interaction performed by the attacker.

Cowrie is developed by Michel Oosterhof.

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

Additional functionality over standard kippo:

• 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)
• Logging in JSON format for easy processing in log management solutions
• Many, many additional commands

Requirements

Software required:

• Python 2.7+, (Python 3 not yet supported due to Twisted dependencies)
• python-virtualenv

For Python dependencies, see requirements.txt

Files of interest:

• cowrie.cfg - Cowrie's configuration file. Default values can be found in cowrie.cfg.dist
• data/fs.pickle - fake filesystem
• data/userdb.txt - credentials allowed or disallowed to access the honeypot
• dl/ - files transferred from the attacker to the honeypot are stored here
• honeyfs/ - file contents for the fake filesystem - feel free to copy a real system here or use bin/fsctl
• log/cowrie.json - transaction output in JSON format
• log/cowrie.log - log/debug output
• log/tty/*.log - session logs
• txtcmds/ - file contents for the fake commands
• bin/createfs - used to create the fake filesystem
• bin/playlog - utility to replay session logs

Is it secure?

Maybe. See FAQ

I have some questions!

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

Contributing

Cowrie welcomes any kind of contribution, please follow the next steps:

• Fork the project on github.com.
• Create a new branch.
• Commit changes to the new branch.
• Send a pull request.

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.
• And many many others.