
productions. So we install them in the file system of 
the LXC-based virtual machine. After that, we can 
quickly and largely deploy the distributed LXC-
based virtual honeypots. 
For evaluation of the proposed development tool 
VNX, we recorded the performance data when we 
implemented the deployment. The system 
parameters of the host node were: CPU, 4 Intel(R) 
Core(TM) i5-3470 CPU @ 3.20GHz; RAM, 16GB; 
OS, Ubuntu 13.10; Kernel, Linux 3.11.0-26-generic. 
We took five parameters into account to evaluate the 
performance: RES (Physical memory used from the 
process), VIRT (Virtual memory used by the 
process), %CPU (The percentage of CPU used by 
the process), %MEM (The percentage of RAM used 
by the process), TIME+ (The total time of active of 
this process). 
We deployed 10 honeypots on a DMZ subnet 
alongside a target network. The host system 
launched 10 processes, and each process 
corresponding to each honeypots. We recorded the 
largest value among these 10 processes with those 
five parameters, and the results were: TIME+, 1:08; 
RES, 206m; VIRT, 864m; %CPU, 118; %MEM 1.3. 
The total time for starting up 10 honeypots is less 
than 5 minutes. But it is a long delay for intrusion 
traffic redirection into the honeypots. Thus, it is 
better to keep the high-interaction honeypots 
running when the redirected intrusion traffics come. 
Nevertheless, when we deployed ten LXC-based 
virtual honeypots, the values of these five 
parameters were: TIME+, 0:00.68; RES, 37m; 
VIRT, 168m; %CPU, 22.5; %MEM, 0.2. Form this 
result, we found that the startup delay of LCX-based 
virtual honeypots was very short, less than 1 second 
for 10 virtual honeypots to boot up, and the resource 
occupation was also quite little. So, if the fidelity of 
the virtual honeynet is not the most important 
consideration, for the large-scale virtual honeypots 
deployment and immediate intrusion response by 
interesting traffics redirection, the LXC-based 
virtual honeypots is the better choice. 
5 CONCLUSIONS 
In this paper, a new approach for the creation and 
management of honeynets based on the use of a 
technology independent honeynet description 
language has been presented. The language is a CIM 
like flexible language designed to describe 
honeynets, with a simple syntax easy to understand. 
It takes into account the characteristics and the 
special requirements of Honeynets. Besides, a 
flexible virtual honeynet tool named HoneyGen that 
uses the specification language to create and modify 
honeynets has been developed as a tool to validate 
all the ideas presented. The results of the 
experiments made show that the HoneyGen can be 
used to quickly and flexibly deploy virtual 
Honeynets based on two different deployment 
platforms: VNX and Honeyd.  
For the future work, there are plans to extend the 
HoneyGen tool to other deployment platforms like 
cloud infrastructures management tools, to study the 
automatic model-driven based translation process 
and to employ this approach in some real security 
project and deploy the honeynet in some production 
network to investigate network intrusion.  
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 
This work is funded by the Spanish MICINN 
(project RECLAMO, Virtual and Collaborative 
Honeynets based on Trust Management and 
Autonomous Systems applied to Intrusion 
Management, with code TIN2011-28287-C02-01. 
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