Enlightening the Darknets: Augmenting Darknet Visibility With Active Probes

Darknets collect unsolicited traffic reaching unused address spaces. They provide insights into malicious activities, such as the rise of botnets and DDoS attacks. However, darknets provide a shallow view, as traffic is never responded. Here we quantify how their visibility increases by responding to traffic with interactive responders with increasing levels of interaction. We consider four deployments: Darknets, simple L4-Responders, vertical L7-Responders bound to specific ports, and DPIpot, a honeypot that responds to all protocols on any port. We contrast these alternatives by analyzing the traffic attracted by each deployment and characterizing how traffic changes throughout the responder lifecycle on the darknet. We show that the deployment of responders increases the value of darknet data by revealing patterns that would otherwise be unobservable. We measure Side-Scan phenomena where once a host starts responding, it attracts traffic to other ports and neighboring addresses. DPIpot uncovers attacks that darknets and L7-Responders would not observe, e.g., large-scale activity on non-standard ports. And we observe how quickly senders can identify and attack new responders. The “enlightened” part of a darknet brings several benefits and offers opportunities to increase the visibility of sender patterns. This information gain is worth taking advantage of, and we, therefore, recommend that organizations consider this option.