Hey everyone,
I wanted to run high-fidelity network canaries in my homelab, but I couldn't justify enterprise pricing, and I wasn't a fan of managing custom orchestration across all my VMs to make available oss solutions work.
So, I built HoneyWire. It’s a completely free, open-source distributed deception platform.
It uses a point-in-time CLI wizard to deploy hardened, distroless Docker traps. You run the command once, it spins up the decoy, registers it to your centralized Hub dashboard, and the setup agent completely exits. No persistent background daemons.
Features:
Zero-Agent: No ongoing background overhead on your hosts.
Centralized UI: View fleet health, uptime, and lateral movement alerts in dark mode.
Alerting: Built-in push notifications and SIEM forwarding.
Privacy: 100% free, open-source, and strictly zero telemetry.
GitHub Repo: https://github.com/andreicscs/HoneyWire Landing Page: https://honeywire.dev/
Would love to hear your thoughts on the architecture or any feedback if you test it out!
Hi thanks for the report! I understand wanting to avoid github I'll consider alternatives! But for now github is the most convinient for the for the project.
Could you provide details about the environment you are deploying in and what your honeywire-compose.yml file generated by the hub looks like?
I'd love to look into your specific edge case it would be awesome if you could provide info that would help me debug it!
You could try to run 'docker logs hw-sensor-tcp-tarpit' command and see if it shows any useful info about the crash
Are you deploying the sensors in the same host as the hub ? If so, What ports are you running the tcp tarpit sensor on and what port is the hub running on ?
The Tarpit sensor crashing is strange, but the Hub crashing too is a huge red flag that I need to fix, a dead sensor should never take down the main Hub!
It doesn't matter if Github is more convenient, I, for example, am straight banned from it with no possibility to sign-up. Issue with arkoselabs not working from my ip/device, which is required to complete captcha for signup, and the support is non existent, see this post.
Ok, issue is clear: tcp-tarpit is trying to use an already occupied port. I was not sure how to check the containers log, your command was correct.
Yes, I was trying to deploy everything on the same machine as starter.
I found that I could change the port from the hub, under fleet management, now it seems to work.
I still don't get why the hub stopped working though. Cpntainer log is only showing from the last start.
I see, i get your feelings about GitHub, i checked out your post and it really is an annoying problem, I'll see what i can do for you and others who can't access GitHub. For now anyone who has trouble accessing GitHub, please feel free to either reach out right here on this post, or via email at info@honeywire.dev.
As for the issue, it would be great if you could provide a little more information about your deployment. Did you use the setup wizard, or did you go with a manual deployment? What does your compose file look like? (It will be located at /opt/honeywire/sensors/honeywire-compose.yml if you used the setup wizard).
The setup wizard is built to prevent you from applying a conflicting config to the node, so this is either a bug with the wizard's environment checks, or a manual deployment that happened to use conflicting ports.
The containers crashing and only showing logs from the last start is definitely interesting behavior. My best guess until I see the config and deployment type is that the Docker daemon hit a fatal error on the port collision panicked and kept restarting the containers, forcing the previous logs to clear as well.
Yes I used the wizard, which is very neat. Yeah, during the setup, all occupied ports are listed, including the one which was already occupied but nevertheless got used by one of the tcp tarpit decoys.
Now I just moved that decoys port (just did +1, I hope that doesn't matter) from the UI which correctly changed the honeywire-compose.yml file. Now it seems to be running properly, and firedrill triggers the notifications.
I think you are right on the compose up crash upon port occupied.
Thank you so much for the additional info, since you used the wizard this shouldn't have happened at all. Can i also ask what port you originally had the hub on?
bumping up the port won't cause any issues at all!, it is what the wizard should have done once it realized the port was already in use. You can run the decoys on any ports you want as long as they are not already bound to that host. I'm glad to hear everything else worked as intended and that the Firedrill successfully triggered your notifications
I have already found the issue and I'm pushing an hotfix for the tcp tarpit sensor right now. Your feedback was very helpful!
Since you've got it running, I'd love to use this opportunity to get your thoughts on the sensor updating process whenever you get a chance to try it.
The hub is running as follow:
That way I had to change as less as possible and just setup a quick reverse proxy. I 100% followed the steps from the README.md in Github for the quick start guide, so this was all wizard and
honeywire apply. 3306 was the already occupied port, occupied by a native program, not a container.That explains it, i still find it weird that the hub was crashing too, but the issue is now solved either way. I just released a hotfix for the sensor. I also released a hotfix for the hub to polish deployment UX and fix a minor issue with sensor updates, i recommend you run 'docker compose up -d --pull always hub' to update the hub and, you should be able to update the sensor from the hub if you haven't already.
Thanks for the help!