What's in a Good Honeytoken
The Metric That Matters
A good honeytoken gets used. If adversaries discover tokens and skip past them, the deployment hasn't achieved much regardless of how many have been scattered across the infrastructure.
This reframes the design question. Rather than asking how to hide tokens, it's worth asking how to make them attractive enough that adversaries actually validate them - to give them options they find difficult to pass up.
Borrowing Trust
The most effective honeytokens borrow trust from somewhere else. When an adversary finds an AWS access key, they're not simply seeing a string of characters. They're seeing Amazon's infrastructure, years of credential handling experience (or the lack of it), and a validation process they already know. Adversaries want to find these keys to the kingdom - more often than not, it's what they're in your environment for in the first place.
This borrowed trust short-circuits caution. Adversaries know how to validate an AWS key - they've done it hundreds of times. The process is familiar, the risk feels manageable, and the potential reward is clear. Their brain takes a shortcut: this is a known quantity.
Compare this to a custom internal token format. Even if it appears legitimate, the adversary faces uncertainty. How does one validate this? What systems does it access? Is testing it worth the exposure risk? Each question adds friction, and friction tends to result in skipping.
Tokens that leverage established trust relationships get validated more frequently than those requiring adversaries to work out new systems.
The Path of Least Resistance
Understanding how adversaries think reveals what drives their decisions. Every obstacle between discovery and validation increases the likelihood an adversary moves on. Effective honeytokens minimise this friction.
Known Validation Paths: Adversaries know how to test cloud credentials, database connections, and API keys. They have tools, scripts, and muscle memory for these. Tokens that fit existing workflows tend to get tested.
Clear Value Proposition: A credential that obviously accesses something valuable proves more attractive than one with ambiguous purpose. An AWS key in a production config file suggests production access. A database credential near application code suggests application data.
Low Perceived Risk: Adversaries weigh reward against exposure risk. Validating a cloud credential feels lower risk than testing something that might trigger custom monitoring. The familiarity of established services provides a degree of cover.
The aim is to make testing the token easier than analysing whether testing is safe.
Passing the Glance Test
Tokens need to pass inspection at the moment of discovery. This isn't about fooling deep forensic analysis - it's about surviving the split-second assessment when an adversary first encounters the credential.
Modern attackers spend considerable time reading through internal documentation - Confluence, Slack, repos, ticketing systems. They're searching for credentials in the places credentials naturally accumulate.
Context Matters: An AWS key in a .env file makes sense. The same key in a marketing PDF raises questions. Tokens belong where the credential type would naturally appear.
Realistic Naming: Credentials follow conventions. Service accounts have service account names. Database users follow organisational patterns. Tokens that violate these conventions invite scrutiny.
Appropriate Age: A credential committed yesterday in a repository with years of history stands out. Timing and context ought to align.
Tokens should look unremarkable in their immediate context.
Stating the Obvious
Deploying only one type of credential at scale allows pattern recognition to undermine the approach. During red team engagements, we'd encounter environments with tens of identical AWS access keys scattered across endpoints. Same format, same structure, same apparent purpose. The pattern was unmistakable. We'd catalogue them, avoid them, and carry on.
Real environments contain credential sprawl - cloud credentials alongside database users alongside SSH keys alongside API tokens, scattered across repositories, configuration files, documentation, CI/CD pipelines, and developer workstations. Service accounts sit next to application credentials next to integration tokens. Some credentials persist for years whilst others rotate weekly.
Effective deployments vary across multiple dimensions:
Credential Types: Cloud credentials, database users, SSH keys, API tokens. Each serves different purposes and appears in different contexts.
Placement Contexts: Repositories, configuration files, documentation, CI/CD pipelines, developer workstations. Legitimate credentials exist everywhere, and deception ought to reflect this.
Apparent Purpose: Service accounts, application credentials, administrative access, integration tokens. Uniform purpose rather signals deception.
Lifecycle: Persistent credentials alongside ephemeral ones. Real infrastructure uses both.
When adversaries enumerate, they should find what looks like normal credential sprawl, not a pattern they can recognise and circumvent.
What This Looks Like in Practice
A good honeytoken:
- Borrows trust from established services adversaries already know
- Fits into existing validation workflows without friction
- Appears unremarkable in its immediate context
- Exists alongside diverse credential types that prevent pattern recognition
A poor honeytoken:
- Requires adversaries to learn new validation processes
- Creates friction through unfamiliar formats or unclear purpose
- Stands out from its surrounding context
- Follows obvious patterns when deployed at scale
Summary
The goal is straightforward: get adversaries to use the token. Everything else follows from this.
Leverage existing trust so validation feels safe. Reduce friction so testing proves easier than analysis. Ensure believability at the point of discovery. Deploy diverse types so pattern recognition fails.
When these principles align, adversaries encounter what appears to be normal credential sprawl. They select one that looks valuable, validate it using familiar tools, and the alert fires.
The attack is the alert. Good honeytokens ensure adversaries find it rather difficult to resist discovering whether they work.
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