Krawl

A modern, customizable web honeypot server designed to detect and track malicious activity from attackers and web crawlers through deceptive web pages, fake credentials, and canary tokens.

Table of Contents

• Demo
• What is Krawl?
• Krawl Dashboard
• Installation
  • Docker Run
  • Docker Compose
  • Kubernetes
  • Local (Python)
• Configuration
  • config.yaml
  • Environment Variables
• Ban Malicious IPs
• IP Reputation
• Forward Server Header
• Additional Documentation
• Contributing

Demo

Tip: crawl the robots.txt paths for additional fun

Krawl URL: http://demo.krawlme.com

View the dashboard http://demo.krawlme.com/das_dashboard

What is Krawl?

Krawl is a cloud‑native deception server designed to detect, delay, and analyze malicious attackers, web crawlers and automated scanners.

It creates realistic fake web applications filled with low‑hanging fruit such as admin panels, configuration files, and exposed fake credentials to attract and identify suspicious activity.

By wasting attacker resources, Krawl helps clearly distinguish malicious behavior from legitimate crawlers.

It features:

• Spider Trap Pages: Infinite random links to waste crawler resources based on the spidertrap project
• Fake Login Pages: WordPress, phpMyAdmin, admin panels
• Honeypot Paths: Advertised in robots.txt to catch scanners
• Fake Credentials: Realistic-looking usernames, passwords, API keys
• Canary Token Integration: External alert triggering
• Random server headers: Confuse attacks based on server header and version
• Real-time Dashboard: Monitor suspicious activity
• Customizable Wordlists: Easy JSON-based configuration
• Random Error Injection: Mimic real server behavior

You can easily expose Krawl alongside your other services to shield them from web crawlers and malicious users using a reverse proxy. For more details, see the Reverse Proxy documentation.

Krawl Dashboard

Krawl provides a comprehensive dashboard, accessible at a random secret path generated at startup or at a custom path configured via KRAWL_DASHBOARD_SECRET_PATH. This keeps the dashboard hidden from attackers scanning your honeypot.

The dashboard is organized in three main tabs:

• Overview — High-level view of attack activity: an interactive map of IP origins, recent suspicious requests, and top IPs, User-Agents, and paths.

• Attacks — Detailed breakdown of captured credentials, honeypot triggers, and detected attack types (SQLi, XSS, path traversal, etc.) with charts and tables.

• IP Insight — In-depth forensic view of a selected IP: geolocation, ISP/ASN info, reputation flags, behavioral timeline, attack type distribution, and full access history.

For more details, see the Dashboard documentation.

🚀 Installation

Docker Run

Run Krawl with the latest image:

docker run -d \
  -p 5000:5000 \
  -e KRAWL_PORT=5000 \
  -e KRAWL_DELAY=100 \
  -e KRAWL_DASHBOARD_SECRET_PATH="/my-secret-dashboard" \
  -v krawl-data:/app/data \
  --name krawl \
  ghcr.io/blessedrebus/krawl:latest

Access the server at http://localhost:5000

Docker Compose

Create a docker-compose.yaml file:

services:
  krawl:
    image: ghcr.io/blessedrebus/krawl:latest
    container_name: krawl-server
    ports:
      - "5000:5000"
    environment:
      - CONFIG_LOCATION=config.yaml
      - TZ=Europe/Rome
    volumes:
      - ./config.yaml:/app/config.yaml:ro
      # bind mount for firewall exporters
      - ./exports:/app/exports
      - krawl-data:/app/data
    restart: unless-stopped

volumes:
  krawl-data:

Run with:

docker-compose up -d

Stop with:

docker-compose down

Kubernetes

Krawl is also available natively on Kubernetes. Installation can be done either via manifest or using the helm chart.

Python + Uvicorn

Run Krawl directly with Python (suggested version 13) and uvicorn for local development or testing:

pip install -r requirements.txt
uvicorn app:app --host 0.0.0.0 --port 5000 --app-dir src

Access the server at http://localhost:5000

Configuration

Krawl uses a configuration hierarchy in which environment variables take precedence over the configuration file. This approach is recommended for Docker deployments and quick out-of-the-box customization.

Configuration via config.yaml

You can use the config.yaml file for advanced configurations, such as Docker Compose or Helm chart deployments.

Configuration via Enviromental Variables

Environment Variable	Description	Default
CONFIG_LOCATION	Path to yaml config file	config.yaml
KRAWL_PORT	Server listening port	5000
KRAWL_DELAY	Response delay in milliseconds	100
KRAWL_SERVER_HEADER	HTTP Server header for deception	""
KRAWL_LINKS_LENGTH_RANGE	Link length range as min,max	5,15
KRAWL_LINKS_PER_PAGE_RANGE	Links per page as min,max	10,15
KRAWL_CHAR_SPACE	Characters used for link generation	abcdefgh...
KRAWL_MAX_COUNTER	Initial counter value	10
KRAWL_CANARY_TOKEN_URL	External canary token URL	None
KRAWL_CANARY_TOKEN_TRIES	Requests before showing canary token	10
KRAWL_DASHBOARD_SECRET_PATH	Custom dashboard path	Auto-generated
KRAWL_PROBABILITY_ERROR_CODES	Error response probability (0-100%)	0
KRAWL_DATABASE_PATH	Database file location	data/krawl.db
KRAWL_EXPORTS_PATH	Path where firewalls rule sets are exported	exports
KRAWL_BACKUPS_PATH	Path where database dump are saved	backups
KRAWL_BACKUPS_CRON	cron expression to control backup job schedule	*/30 * * * *
KRAWL_BACKUPS_ENABLED	Boolean to enable db dump job	true
KRAWL_DATABASE_RETENTION_DAYS	Days to retain data in database	30
KRAWL_HTTP_RISKY_METHODS_THRESHOLD	Threshold for risky HTTP methods detection	0.1
KRAWL_VIOLATED_ROBOTS_THRESHOLD	Threshold for robots.txt violations	0.1
KRAWL_UNEVEN_REQUEST_TIMING_THRESHOLD	Coefficient of variation threshold for timing	0.5
KRAWL_UNEVEN_REQUEST_TIMING_TIME_WINDOW_SECONDS	Time window for request timing analysis in seconds	300
KRAWL_USER_AGENTS_USED_THRESHOLD	Threshold for detecting multiple user agents	2
KRAWL_ATTACK_URLS_THRESHOLD	Threshold for attack URL detection	1
KRAWL_INFINITE_PAGES_FOR_MALICIOUS	Serve infinite pages to malicious IPs	true
KRAWL_MAX_PAGES_LIMIT	Maximum page limit for crawlers	250
KRAWL_BAN_DURATION_SECONDS	Ban duration in seconds for rate-limited IPs	600

For example

# Set canary token
export CONFIG_LOCATION="config.yaml"
export KRAWL_CANARY_TOKEN_URL="http://your-canary-token-url"

# Set number of pages range (min,max format)
export KRAWL_LINKS_PER_PAGE_RANGE="5,25"

# Set analyzer thresholds
export KRAWL_HTTP_RISKY_METHODS_THRESHOLD="0.2"
export KRAWL_VIOLATED_ROBOTS_THRESHOLD="0.15"

# Set custom dashboard path
export KRAWL_DASHBOARD_SECRET_PATH="/my-secret-dashboard"

Example of a Docker run with env variables:

docker run -d \
  -p 5000:5000 \
  -e KRAWL_PORT=5000 \
  -e KRAWL_DELAY=100 \
  -e KRAWL_CANARY_TOKEN_URL="http://your-canary-token-url" \
  --name krawl \
  ghcr.io/blessedrebus/krawl:latest

Use Krawl to Ban Malicious IPs

Krawl uses a reputation-based system to classify attacker IP addresses. Every five minutes, Krawl exports the identified malicious IPs to a malicious_ips.txt file.

This file can either be mounted from the Docker container into another system or downloaded directly via curl:

curl https://your-krawl-instance/<DASHBOARD-PATH>/api/download/malicious_ips.txt

This file enables automatic blocking of malicious traffic across various platforms. You can use it to update firewall rules on:

• OPNsense and pfSense
• RouterOS
• IPtables and Nftables
• Fail2Ban

IP Reputation

Krawl uses tasks that analyze recent traffic to build and continuously update an IP reputation score. It runs periodically and evaluates each active IP address based on multiple behavioral indicators to classify it as an attacker, crawler, or regular user. Thresholds are fully customizable.

The analysis includes:

• Risky HTTP methods usage (e.g. POST, PUT, DELETE ratios)
• Robots.txt violations
• Request timing anomalies (bursty or irregular patterns)
• User-Agent consistency
• Attack URL detection (e.g. SQL injection, XSS patterns)

Each signal contributes to a weighted scoring model that assigns a reputation category:

• attacker
• bad_crawler
• good_crawler
• regular_user
• unknown (for insufficient data)

The resulting scores and metrics are stored in the database and used by Krawl to drive dashboards, reputation tracking, and automated mitigation actions such as IP banning or firewall integration.

Forward server header

If Krawl is deployed behind a proxy such as NGINX the server header should be forwarded using the following configuration in your proxy:

location / {
    proxy_pass https://your-krawl-instance;
    proxy_pass_header Server;
}

Additional Documentation

Topic	Description
API	External APIs used by Krawl for IP data, reputation, and geolocation
Honeypot	Full overview of honeypot pages: fake logins, directory listings, credential files, SQLi/XSS/XXE/command injection traps, and more
Reverse Proxy	How to deploy Krawl behind NGINX or use decoy subdomains
Database Backups	Enable and configure the automatic database dump job
Canary Token	Set up external alert triggers via canarytokens.org
Wordlist	Customize fake usernames, passwords, and directory listings
Dashboard	Access and explore the real-time monitoring dashboard

🤝 Contributing

Contributions welcome! Please:

1. Fork the repository
2. Create a feature branch
3. Make your changes
4. Submit a pull request (explain the changes!)

Disclaimer

Caution

This is a deception/honeypot system. Deploy in isolated environments and monitor carefully for security events. Use responsibly and in compliance with applicable laws and regulations.

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