Cybersecurity and honeypots: Experience in a scientific network infrastructure

When dealing with security concerns in the use of network infrastructures a good balance between security concerns and the right to privacy should be maintained. This is very important in scientific networks, because they were created with an open and decentralized philosophy, in favor of the transmission of knowledge, when security was not a essential topic. Although private and scientific information have an enormous value for an attacker, the user privacy for legal and ethical reasons must be respected. Thus, passive detection methods in cybersecurity such as honeypots are a good strategy to achieve this balance between security and privacy in the defense plan of a scientific network. In this paper we present the practical case of the University of Granada in the application of honeypots for the detection and study of intrusions, which avoid intrusive techniques such as the direct analysis of the traffic through networking devices.