We investigated client honeypots for detecting and circumstantially analyzing drive-by download attacks. A client honeypot requires both improved inspection performance and in-depth analysis for inspecting and discovering malicious websites. However, OS overhead in recent client honeypot operation cannot be ignored when improving honeypot multiplication performance. We propose a client honeypot system that is a combination of multi-OS and multi-process honeypot approaches, and we implemented

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... s system to evaluate its performance. The process sandbox mechanism, a security measure for our multi-process approach, provides a virtually isolated environment for each web browser. It prevents system alteration from a compromised browser process by I/O redirection of file/registry access. To solve the inconsistency problem of file/registry view by I/O redirection, our process sandbox mechanism enables the web browser and corresponding plug-ins to share a virtual system view. Therefore, it enables multiple processes to be run simultaneously without interference behavior of processes on a single OS. In a field trial, we confirmed that the use of our multi-process approach was three or more times faster than that of a single process, and our multi-OS approach linearly improved system performance according to the number of honeypot instances. In addition, our long-term investigation indicated that 72.3% of exploitations target browser-helper processes. If a honeypot restricts all process creation events, it cannot identify an exploitation targeting a browser-helper process. In contrast, our process sandbox mechanism permits the creation of browser-helper processes, so it can identify these types of exploitations without resulting in false negatives. Thus, our proposed system with these multiplication approaches improves performance efficiency and enables indepth analysis on high interaction systems. key words: client honeypot, drive-by download, web-based malware, process sandbox, intrusion detection