Do You Really Need to Disguise Normal Servers as Honeypots?

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the effectiveness of honeypot deception strategies in cybersecurity, revealing that disguising normal servers as honeypots does not necessarily improve defender rewards and may increase operational costs.

Contribution

It provides a theoretical framework comparing honeypot techniques and clarifies when deception strategies are beneficial or costly in real-world scenarios.

Findings

Honeypots generally increase defender benefits over no deception.

Disguising normal servers as honeypots does not improve rewards.

Fake honeypots can raise maintenance costs for normal nodes.

Abstract

A honeypot, which is a kind of deception strategy, has been widely used for at least 20 years to mitigate cyber threats. Decision-makers have believed that honeypot strategies are intuitive and effective, since honeypots have successfully protected systems from Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks to Advanced Persistent Threats (APT) in real-world cases. Nonetheless, there is a lack of research on the appropriate level of honeypot technique application to choose real-world operations. We examine and contrast three attack-defense games with respect to honeypot detection techniques in this paper. In particular, we specifically design and contrast two stages of honeypot technology one by one, starting with a game without deception. We demonstrate that the return for a defender using honeypots is higher than for a defender without them, albeit the defender may not always benefit financially from using more honeypot deception strategies. Particularly, disguising regular servers as honeypots does not provide defenders with a better reward. Furthermore, we take in consideration that fake honeypots can make maintaining normal nodes more costly. Our research offers a theoretical foundation for the real-world operator's decision of honeypot deception tactics and the required number of honeypot nodes.