Chakravyu: A Five-Ring Cyber Deception Architecture for Personal and Small-Organization Infrastructure — Design Report and Deployment Blueprint

Commercial cyber-deception platforms target enterprise budgets and rely on managed-service deployment models that are not accessible to small-organization or personal-infrastructure defenders. Open-source building blocks exist (Cowrie, Endlessh, go-pot, Canarytokens, HoneyGPT-adjacent work) but each addresses a single layer of the deception stack. Composing them into an operational whole is left to the defender. We present Chakravyu, a five-ring cyber-deception architecture designed for deployment on a 10-node operator-owned heterogeneous compute cluster, with explicit legal-boundary enforcement and an AI-orchestrated decision layer (ARES). The architecture is named after the Chakravyuha formation from the Mahabharata — easy to enter, progressively harder to exit. The paper is a design report: the architecture is fully specified, component responsibilities and inter-layer interfaces are defined, and a complete deployment blueprint spanning six operator-owned servers, two cloud VPS regions, and Tor hidden services is described. The source implementation is not yet written at time of publication; the paper deliberately precedes implementation in order to document design choices honestly and invite critique before code-lock. We map the architecture against MITRE ATT&CK tactics and MITRE Engage engagement goals, characterize the legal-compliance boundary separating production deployment from research-only offensive tooling, and report the specific open questions (cross-jurisdiction token-callback law, LLM-induced deception drift, attribution-fingerprint leakage) that the implementation phase will need to resolve.