SSH tarpit that slowly sends an endless banner
Go to file
Christopher Wellons 9f4bdc123d Greatly simplify a bunch of things
1. If sockets are non-blocking, no need to use poll() on them. Just try
to write regardless and ignore the outcome. This means we don't need the
pollvec stuff anymore.

2. getline(3) is apparently still too new to POSIX that it's hard to use
portably. We don't really need it that badly anyway.

3. Don't use MSG_DONTWAIT. It's non-standard and apparently still hard
to use portably. Set sockets to non-blocking instead.

4. Since we're not polling on client sockets, the queue is a whole lot
simpler.
2019-03-26 20:30:03 -04:00
util Add restart limit in case it gets stuck in a crash loop 2019-03-22 17:21:57 -05:00
.gitignore Initial working code 2019-02-02 22:38:59 -05:00
Dockerfile Make final docker image smaller 2019-03-23 18:04:02 +00:00
endlessh.c Greatly simplify a bunch of things 2019-03-26 20:30:03 -04:00
Makefile Makefile: add all target 2019-03-26 19:45:00 +03:00
README.md Improve support for Solaris and its derivatives 2019-03-26 18:23:15 -04:00
UNLICENSE Initial working code 2019-02-02 22:38:59 -05:00

Endlessh: an SSH tarpit

Endlessh is an SSH tarpit that very slowly sends an endless, random SSH banner. It keeps SSH clients locked up for hours or even days at a time. The purpose is to put your real SSH server on another port and then let the script kiddies get stuck in this tarpit instead of bothering a real server.

Since the tarpit is in the banner before any cryptographic exchange occurs, this program doesn't depend on any cryptographic libraries. It's a simple, single-threaded, standalone C program. It uses poll() to trap multiple clients at a time.

Usage

Usage information is printed with -h.

Usage: endlessh [-vh] [-d MS] [-f CONFIG] [-l LEN] [-m LIMIT] [-p PORT]
  -d INT    Message millisecond delay [10000]
  -f        Set and load config file [/etc/endlessh/config]
  -h        Print this help message and exit
  -l INT    Maximum banner line length (3-255) [32]
  -m INT    Maximum number of clients [4096]
  -p INT    Listening port [2222]
  -v        Print diagnostics to standard output (repeatable)

Argument order matters. The configuration file is loaded when the -f argument is processed, so only the options that follow will override the configuration file.

By default no log messages are produced. The first -v enables basic logging and a second -v enables debugging logging (noisy). All log messages are sent to standard output.

endlessh -v >endlessh.log 2>endlessh.err

A SIGTERM signal will gracefully shut down the daemon, allowing it to write a complete, consistent log.

A SIGHUP signal requests a reload of the configuration file (-f).

Sample Configuration File

The configuration file has similar syntax to OpenSSH.

# The port on which to listen for new SSH connections.
Port 2222

# The endless banner is sent one line at a time. This is the delay
# in milliseconds between individual lines.
Delay 10000

# The length of each line is randomized. This controls the maximum
# length of each line. Shorter lines may keep clients on for longer if
# they give up after a certain number of bytes.
MaxLineLength 32

# Maximum number of connections to accept at a time. Connections beyond
# this are not immediately rejected, but will wait in the queue.
MaxClients 4096

# Set the detail level for the log.
#   0 = Quiet
#   1 = Standard, useful log messages
#   2 = Very noisy debugging information
LogLevel 0

Build issues

Some more esoteric systems require extra configuration when building.

RHEL 6 / CentOS 6

This system uses a version of glibc older than 2.17 (December 2012), and clock_gettime(2) is still in librt. For these systems you will need to link against librt:

make LDLIBS=-lrt

Solaris / illumos

These systems don't include all the necessary functionality in libc and the linker requires some extra libraries:

make CC=gcc LDLIBS='-lnsl -lrt -lsocket'

If you're not using GCC or Clang, also override CFLAGS and LDFLAGS to remove GCC-specific options. For example, on Solaris:

make CFLAGS=-fast LDFLAGS= LDLIBS='-lnsl -lrt -lsocket'