HoneyThing: A New Honeypot Design for CPE Devices

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) has become an emerging industry that is broadly used in many fields from industrial and agricultural manufacturing to home automation and hospitality industry. Because of the sheer number of connected devices transmitting valuable data, the IoT infrastructures have become a main target for cyber-criminals. One of the key challenges in protecting IoT devices is the lack of security measures by design. Although there are many hardware and software based security solutions (firewalls, honeypots, IPDS, anti-virus etc.) for information systems, most of these solutions cannot be applied to IoT devices because of the fact that IoT devices have limited computing resources (CPU, RAM,). In this paper, we propose a honeypot system called HoneyThing for modem/router devices (i.e. a kind of IoT device). HoneyThing emulates TR-069 protocol which is prevalent protocol used to remotely manage customer-premises equipment (CPE) devices, e.g. modems, routers. Honeything also serves an embedded web server simulating a few actual, critical vulnerabilities associated with the implementation of TR-069 protocol. To show effectiveness of the HoneyThing in capturing real world attacks, we have deployed it in the Internet. The obtained results are highly promising and facilitate to reveal network attacks targeting to CPE devices.

A systematic and critical review of Internet of Things in contemporary hospitality: a roadmap and avenues for future research

“…Hackers and attackers may gain information about customers and hospitality organizations (Mercan et al , 2020). Erdem et al (2018) asserted that IoT devices face cyber-criminals because of the process of transferring valuable data. Hence, hospitality firms may be afraid of IoT adoption in daily processes.…”

“…They also should provide hospitality sectors with security solutions, such as firewalls, honeypots, IPDS and antivirus to secure IoT technologies from cybercriminals. In addition, IoT manufacturers have to develop a honeypot system to capture and reveal network attacks against devices of client premises, such as modems and routers (Erdem et al , 2018).…”

“…IoT, robots, big data and artificial intelligence are features of Industry 4.0 (Hua et al , 2020; Yan et al , 2017; Zarezadeh et al , 2022). One of the emerging industries is IoT which is broadly used in diverse domains, such as energy, health care, chemical, education, transportation, manufacturing, smart cities and the hospitality industry (Erdem et al , 2018; Madakam et al , 2015; Makhdoom et al , 2018; Pizam, 2017). IoT could be also defined as “a network of interconnected objects, in which every object in the world seeks to communicate and exchange information actively” (Ali et al , 2018, p. 328).…”