Hey everyone,
I wanted to run high-fidelity network canaries in my homelab, but I couldn’t justify enterprise pricing, and I wasn’t a fan of managing custom orchestration across all my VMs to make available oss solutions work.
So, I built HoneyWire. It’s a completely free, open-source distributed deception platform.
It uses a point-in-time CLI wizard to deploy hardened, distroless Docker traps. You run the command once, it spins up the decoy, registers it to your centralized Hub dashboard, and the setup agent completely exits. No persistent background daemons.
Features:
Zero-Agent: No ongoing background overhead on your hosts.
Centralized UI: View fleet health, uptime, and lateral movement alerts in dark mode.
Alerting: Built-in push notifications and SIEM forwarding.
Privacy: 100% free, open-source, and strictly zero telemetry.
GitHub Repo: https://github.com/andreicscs/HoneyWire Landing Page: https://honeywire.dev/
Would love to hear your thoughts on the architecture or any feedback if you test it out!
AI Disclosure: As a student and solo developer/maintainer, I used AI as a “junior dev” during project development to help accelerate boilerplate writing and documentation. All core architecture, system structure, and security logic were fully designed and implemented by me.
Another AI generated project from a person who has zero comment history beyond promoting said project and is likely to stop committing to the repo in a week.
Thanks for the feedback! Not quite, but I get the skepticism with how many low-effort vibecoded projects are launching right now! I’d love for you to take a look at the project (or my other projects), I’m not a vibe coder, and I’m not new at coding at all. This project is 3 months old and as you can see from the commit history I’ve been consistently fixing things and adding new features to it since when it first launched. This is the v2.0 release, there were other releases before over the course of the last few months, this update in particular is a Security and UX update focused on improving supply chain security, and deployment friction. Feel free to check out the changelogs for a closer look at the changes: https://github.com/andreicscs/HoneyWire/blob/main/CHANGELOG.md
I’m sharing this tool because it fixed a personal problem, and i noticed many others had the same feelings regarding available deception technology options especially in OSS.
Appreciate you taking the time to respond. I’m so jaded by the low effort posts here that it’s made me grumpy 😂
No problem at all, i get it! If you end up actually taking a look at the project or even deploying it I’d love to get some feedback on it, I’m currently starving for feedback and opinions 😂
Do I understand correctly that with HoneyWire you deploy ‘false assets’? I guess along the lines of a honeypot but the ability to deceive bots and other nefarious actors into thinking there are specific assets that they might want to exploit?
That’s exactly how it works. You deploy these low-interaction decoys (traps) across your internal network to act as tripwires. Since legitimate users have no reason to touch them, any interaction is a high-fidelity alert indicating a potential breach or lateral movement. Right now, you can spin up a few different types of traps, like a network scan detector that sits completely quietly and triggers an alert if it detects a port or network scan hitting that specific node, or a Web Router Login Page, that looks like a legacy admin interface and instantly alerts you if someone tries to brute-force or log in. The best part about HoneyWire’s architecture is that developing new sensors is the easiest part, so the ecosystem is designed to be highly extensible as the community grows.
That’s very interesting. Thanks.
Now for the burning question on everyone’s mind…was this vibe coded, or AI assisted in any way? I don’t outright reject AI assisted projects, but of course my concerns are always security. Also, what is the depth of your experience coding?
Thanks
No issue that’s a completely fair question, yes AI was used as an accelerator for writing boilerplate code, scaffolding the initial UI layout, and helping me structure the documentation. However, the core security logic, container architecture, and threat model were entirely designed and verified by me. I have about 8-9 years of software development experience. While HoneyWire is my first major public release, it’s the culmination of years of building internal tools, network utilities, and lab environments.
Because security is the primary focus, I deliberately designed the architecture to minimize risks. I highly encourage you to review the source code on GitHub, I’d be happy to receive feedback about the architecture or any threat-modeling critiques!
