Sonification of a network’s self-organized criticality for real-time situational awareness

TLDR: A system is described that sonifies in real time an information infrastructure’s self-organized criticality to alert the network administrators of both normal and abnormal network traffic and operation.

About: This article is published in Displays.The article was published on 2017-04-01 and is currently open access. It has received 8 citations till now. The article focuses on the topics: Sonification & Network monitoring.

Figures

Figure 2: (a) Shows a Daubechies wavelet analysis of DDoS traffic data while (b) presents the denoised traffic residuals. 14

Table 1: Example sound files

Figure 1: (a) shows a Daubechies wavelet analysis of normal traffic data while (b) shows the denoised traffic residuals. 13

Figure 5: This screen grab shows the double spike in the sent bytes and received bytes variables. The log returns are negative jumps as shown by the descending peaks. The sound files spike2 1s a.wav and spike2 1s.wav demonstrate how this sounds at playback speeds of 1 s per record, using the absolute and signed log returns respectively. spike2 20ms a.wav is the same traffic segment but played back at 20 ms per record and using absolute (unsigned) values.

Figure 6: This screen grab shows shows a series of spikes in the sent bytes and received bytes variables.The audio file multiSpike 1s.wav demonstrates how this sounds at a playback speed of 1 s per record using signed log return values. There is an audible difference between the positive and negative traffic changes. However, notice how the peaks are not salient when playing back signed values at the faster rate of 20 ms as in multiSpike 20ms.wav — the peaks occur at around the 1.5 s mark in the audio file.

Figure 8: This screen shot of the voice channel section shows log return spikes occurring on all four channels with the largest values occuring in the sent bytes and sent packets streams. These spikes generate a noticeable increase in the amplitude and brightening of the timbre of the soundscape.

Frequently asked questions

Q1. What contributions have the authors mentioned in the paper "Sonification of a network’s self-organized criticality for real-time situational awareness" ?

This article focuses on the combination of two dissimilar research concepts, namely sonification ( a form of auditory display ) and self-organized criticality ( SOC ). Implications for how such a system may support real-time situational awareness and posthoc incident analysis are discussed.