It feels inevitable that computer security will continue evolving towards "active defense" typified by approaches like the above. Look at how complex and many-layered your immune system is, and consider that eventually your computer and/or network will resemble that as well.
IMO this is still a passive type of security through obfuscation. Active defence would be more like returning zip bombs to known intruders in order to crash the process.
It appears it can be configured to actively return attacks:
> Portspoof can be used as an 'Exploitation Framework Frontend', that turns your system into responsive and aggressive machine. In practice this usually means exploiting your attackers' tools and exploits
There's tons of client software that can be exploited if you send a dangerous payload to it. Think of an exploitable version of Curl that will fail if it receives a bad http header.
I would guess that it fingerprints the scanning software (e.g. metasploit), then feeds a payload back to it that has a known exploit in the scanning script.
I'm not sure I like this analogy since the immune system regularly malfunctions and damages the host (allergies, cancer, etc) but then again, it does draw some concerning parallels,.
The immune system is an incredible marvel of engineering, protecting you against an infinite number of attack vectors without any online database update after initial installation. It develops countermeasures on the fly, deploys layers of Defense that coordinate intelligently as a swarm, and keeps track of which molecules belong to „you“ while those molecules keep replacing themselves with those obtained from the outside. It constantly ingests signals from billions of sensors over your body which function as first-responder Defense measures as well as repair kits AND evidence capsules for the cavalry that rolls in later. And that’s just a sliver of all the ingenious ways the immune system works.
I also suffer from severe asthma and allergies, both of which are, by all accounts, not normal or wanted responses of the immune system, not to mention of the low-end of the horror spectrum when it comes to immune function that is terrifyingly harmful to the host.
It is an exceptionally complex and wonderous thing, but where we diverge is in thinking of it as a "marvel of engineering" or any other prose that implies some sort of guiding hand. It is a far from perfect system, and gets things wrong often enough that we have a global industry creating products to control it.
> […] thinking of it as a "marvel of engineering" or any other prose that implies some sort of guiding hand.
Heh. It's hard to talk about the way things have been shaped by evolution without implying an actor, because our vocabulary is so very shaped by our subjective experience. I, personally, am reasonably certain that there is no creator in whatever sense. Yet, I'm still awestruck at the ingenuity life on our planet has shown, and the immune system is a never-ending source of wonder to me.
And while it surely isn't perfect, if we were to look at the raw numbers of incidents versus the number of adversary action against your body—that would be pretty darn near perfect.
Having all ports open is not a butterfly pretending to be a predator. It's a butterfly pretending to be everything, including other prey that would attract other predators.
