An API honeypot for DDoS and XSS analysis

Honeypots are servers or systems built to mimic critical parts of a network, distracting attackers while logging their information to develop attack profiles. This paper discusses the design and implementation of a honeypot disguised as a REpresentational State Transfer (REST) Application Programming Interface (API). We discuss the motivation for this work, design features of the honeypot, and experimental performance results under various traffic conditions. We also present analyses of both a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack and a cross-site scripting (XSS) malware insertion attempt against this honeypot.