Far too many products will blindly spray credentials across the network as part of discovery, monitoring, or security scanning tasks. Identifying these products and capturing these credentials requires patiently waiting for the next scan cycle and implementing whichever protocol the product tries to authenticate with. If this is done during a security assessment, the capture process may need to run on a compromised internal server, introducing additional challenges.

During the last Atredis offsite, Chris Bellows suggested that we build better tooling for this, focusing on the protocols that other tools miss and on delivering portable binaries for use on compromised servers. This led to the creation of flamingo, an open-source utility that spawns a bunch of network daemons, waits for inbound credentials, and reports them through a variety of means.

Flamingo is written in Go, includes pre-compiled binaries, and has already received one pull request from outside of Atredis (thanks Alex!). Flamingo can capture inbound credentials for SSH, HTTP, LDAP, FTP, and SNMP, as well as log inbound DNS (and mDNS) queries. On the output side, Flamingo can log to a file, standard output, deliver to a webhook, write to a remote syslog server, or all of those at once. As a Go binary, everything is baked into a single executable, and it cross-compiles to almost every supported Go platform and architecture. Go is awesome for security tool development and was a great fit for this problem.

Flamingo is not Responder. Responder is an amazing tool that listens on the network, responds to name requests, and captures credentials. While the main goal of Responder is to coerce systems on the same broadcast domain into sending it Active Directory credentials, Flamingo takes a more passive approach, and does not actively solicit connections through LLMNR or NetBIOS responses. For most scenarios where you want to capture Active Directory credentials, Responder is still your tool of choice.

In addition to portability, configurable outputs, and different protocol support, Flamingo has other unique capabilities worth mentioning.

Flamingo's SSH capture stores all the normal things for password-based authentication, but also reports the entire SSH public key for pubkey-based authentication. This public key can be used to half-auth-scan the local network and identify servers where that credential is accepted. The public key can also be correlated against public keystores, such as Github.com users, to identify the user responsible for the pubkey authentication attempt.

Flamingo supports Nmap-style port ranges for all listeners. Want to spawn a few different SSH servers? Go for it with --ssh-ports 22,2222,4022,6022,8022. How about 100? Sure, with --ssh-ports 1-100. This works across all supported protocols and will try to bind to as many ports as it can, ignoring conflicts, unless the --dont-ignore flag is set. Want to run a mix of plain HTTP and HTTPS services? Use the –-http-ports and –-https-ports parameters to separately define lists of plaintext and encrypted web servers as needed. Only care about LDAP over TLS today? Set –-protocols ldap, --ldap-ports to an empty string, and –-ldaps-ports to your desired list.

Flamingo generates new SSH and TLS keys on startup, by default, and shares these keys across all services. This behavior can be changed by specifying the the --ssh-host-key, --tls-cert, and –-tls-key options, but its nice to not have to worry about it too. The --tls-org option can be used to set the presented organization name in the TLS certificate and the --tls-name option can be used to set the advertised server name in responses.

Flamingo can also support blue teams by feeding authentication attempts into a central reporting system. Drive alerts from your SIEM of choice, either through log parsing, syslog destinations, or plain old webhooks. Flamingo is no Canary, but can be helpful in a pinch, and is certainly a lot more portable than most honeypot listeners.

In summary, we think Flamingo is neat, and would love your feedback and pull requests. If you need a local LLMNR/NetBIOS/mDNS poisoner, Responder is still your tool of choice. If you need a commercial-quality honeypot, Canary is going to be a much better time investment. If you are looking for a tool to capture credentials sprayed by various IT and security scanners, Flamingo might be useful, especially if you need portable binaries and flexible real-time output options. We plan continue building out Flamingo's protocol support and implementing additional output types going forward. If you have any suggestions or run across any bugs, please file an issue in the Github tracker.

-HD and Tom