Tales from the CRYPT(3)

Stories from the early Honeynet Project years (1999 to 2005)

This year (2019) is the 20th anniversary of the Honeynet Project, which was celebrated at the annual workshop in Innsbruck, Austria.

I was one of the earliest members of the group and have served as an Officer in two different roles (Secretary, then Chief Legal and Ethics Officer) over much of this time. This article is my perspective on a few significant events and previously untold stories from the early years, constructed from my own memory, search engines and the Wayback Machine, and the recollections of several other fantastic people who took part in this history. We learned many lessons, met many people, visited many places, and had a lot of fun along the way. The majority of the current membership were not yet part of the project, so even though this is a long read, I hope they (and you) enjoy these stories.

The birth of the “Annual Workshop”

Since this history was written for the annual workshop, let’s start there.

When the Honeynet Project first started, there were about two dozen people who could get together #IRL outside of computer security conferences like Blackhat/DEFCON, CanSecWest, and SANS. The group was small enough that for the first few years Lance hosted a party for us in his home outside Chicago.

Over time, a series of rules were instituted to deal with occasional “issues” (shall we say?) that arose during the party. For example, there was once a buffer overflow exploit in the downstairs bathroom toilet. (No CVE number was ever assigned to this particular vuln, so I can’t cite it here.) These rules included:

Year 1 — No barfing in Lance’s house — use the woods.
Year 2 — No feeding the baby beer.
Year 3 — Open the screen door before you walk through it.
Year 4 — Lance’s wife bans the Honeynet Project from the house.

I’m pretty sure I was one (but not the only one!) of the motivating factors for Rule #3.

The “annual workshop” formally began when the group got too large to fit in Lance’s man cave and was moved to a downtown Chicago hotel with a room large enough to hold the whole group and reasonable room prices for attendees, who flew in from around the globe.

Besides the annual workshop for the group and special invitees, a few even larger mini-conferences were sponsored by…