FloVis: Leveraging Visualization to Protect Sensitive Network Infrastructure

Abstract

The analysis and evaluation of the network traffic passing over NATO's communication networks is an important yet daunting task for its operators, analysts and system security officers due to the volume and complexity of the data. The following report presents ongoing work in the development of an extensible suite of network traffic visualization tools, called FloVis, that aims to address these issues. FloVis is a visualization framework designed to incorporate different network visualizations seamlessly, as plugins, under one application. The current iteration of the toolset is described below which uses visualization as a mechanism for capturing different aspects of network traffic. Each tool allows the analyst to understand/interpret/model the data in a different but related way. By combining them under the FloVis framework, the analyst has integrated access to each view to help focus his investigation onto areas of interest. As a demonstration of FloVis' effectiveness and its potential, examples have been provided below which illustrate how it can be used for understanding network traffic and detecting security events.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Nov 01, 2010
Accession Number
ADA584038

Entities

People

  • C. Gates
  • D. Paterson
  • J. Cole Smith
  • J. Glanfield
  • J. Mchugh
  • S. Brooks
  • T. Taylor

Organizations

  • Dalhousie University

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Cyber

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Abstracts
  • Algorithms
  • Case Studies
  • Clustering
  • Cyber Defense Techniques
  • Data Sets
  • Homeland Security
  • Information Assurance
  • Infrastructure
  • Nova Scotia
  • Office Buildings
  • Organizational Structure
  • Scanning
  • Security
  • Two Dimensional
  • Universities
  • Visualizations

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Computer Networking
  • Database Systems and Applications
  • Systems Analysis and Design