A honeypot is a closely monitored network decoy serving several purposes: it can distract adversaries from more valuable machines on a network, provide early warning about new attack and exploitation trends, or allow in-depth examination of adversaries during and after exploitation of a honeypot.
Deploying a physical honeypot is often time intensive and expensive as different operating systems require specialized hardware and every honeypot requires its own physical system. This paper presents Honeyd, a framework for virtual honeypots that simulates virtual computer systems at the network level.