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.

Slack

You can join the Cowrie community at the following Slack workspace

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

Docker

Docker versions are available.

• Get the Dockerfile directly at https://github.com/cowrie/docker-cowrie
• Run from the Docker regstry with: docker pull cowrie/cowrie

Requirements

Software required:

• Python 2.7+, (Limited Python 3 support available for SSH only)
• 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
• honeyfs/etc/issue.net - pre-login banner
• honeyfs/etc/motd - post-login banner
• 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://cowrie.slack.com/ and join the #questions channel

I'd like to install with Docker

Run: docker pull cowrie/cowrie to download images from hub.docker.com

Or look at https://github.com/cowrie/docker-cowrie for the Dockerfile

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.