A Dynamically Reconfigured Network Platform for High-Speed Malware Collection

Malicious software has become a major threat to computer users on the Internet today. To combat it, security researchers need to gather and analyze many samples to develop proper defense mechanisms. The setting of honeypots, which emulate vulnerable applications, is one method of gathering attack code. In contrast to the conventional software-based honeypots, we have proposed a dedicated hardware architecture for honeypots to both allow high-speed operation at rates of 10+ Gb/s as well as a higher resilience against attacks on the honey pot infrastructure itself. We now improve the flexibility of our prior solution by using partial dynamic reconfiguration to update the functionality of the honey pot during operation.