Beautiful Security

Related Work

Although honeyclient technology is relatively new compared to honeypots, anti-virus, and intrusion detection system (IDS) technologies, currently there are at least several separate honeyclient efforts occurring. Various honeyclients were developed for different purposes, but most of them focused on detecting malicious websites.

Back when I started working on the first-generation open source honeyclient, Microsoft was developing honeyclients (which they call honeymonkeys). Microsoft and I were developing honeyclients in parallel, and it wasn’t until I had already written the first prototype that I found out about Microsoft honeyclients, and vice versa. Unfortunately, I was never able to get information from Microsoft about their honeymonkey internals, and there’s not a lot of information on the implementation details of honeymonkeys.^[76]

As a researcher, I cannot emphasize enough the importance of communicating with other researchers about a technology that you’re working on. Some people I’ve talked to feel conflicted about this. On the one hand, if they share their ideas, they may be able to find others who have also thought about the idea, and in return, their original idea can get more refined. On the other hand, they are worried that people will steal their idea if they mention it. I would argue that very few people have such striking ideas that absolutely no one else in the world has ever thought of them. So in the end, the people who want to just hold onto their ...