How feasible is a distributed honeypot deployment in the cloud?

The rapid growth of the Internet over recent years has had a revolutionary effect on many areas of society, but this growth has also been combined with a growth of cybercrime and the spread of malware. Researchers have spent a considerable amount of time and resources trying to study the ways malware is distributed and one common technique of research is through the deployment of honeypots. Honeypots are passive systems set up with a number of sensors in order to monitor any activity with and within the system. In the past honeypot deployment has been restricted by the amount of system resources available, but developments in cloud computing has potentially made the deployment of honeypots at a wider scale far easier and more economical. The study has sought to determine how feasible it is to deploy a group of honeypots in the cloud and what sort of valuable information such a deployment can obtain to aid in the fight against cybercrime. This paper demonstrates that although there are limitations, it is feasible to deploy a wide range of honeypots in the cloud which can obtain valuable information about threats to Linux, Windows and web server systems.