Securing E-Government Assets through Automating Deployment of Honeynets for IDS Support

One of the challenges facing system e-government security professionals is the laborious task of sifting through numerous log files in an attempt to identify malicious traffic and conduct a forensics analysis to determine an appropriate course of action. This process is complicated significantly by the volume of traffic that can be associated with a production system environment. A honeynet can provide a mechanism to identify much of the forensically interesting traffic by creating a representative system to collect traffic data. However, it is challenging to maintain an accurate representation of a dynamic system in order to consistently collect the appropriate data of interest. This research effort addresses a current challenge identified by researchers at the Honeynet Project by describing a methodology for automatically creating and dynamically updating a honeynet in order to facilitate IDS support.