Sonification with music for cybersecurity situational awareness
Author(s)
Falk, Courtney
Dykstra, Josiah
Advisor(s)
Editor(s)
Collections
Supplementary to:
Permanent Link
Abstract
Cyber defenders work in stressful, information-rich, and highstakes environments. While other researchers have considered sonification for security operations centers (SOCs), the mappings of network events to sound parameters have produced aesthetically unpleasing results. This paper proposes a novel sonification process for transforming data about computer network traffic into music. The musical cues relate to notable network events in such a way as to minimize the amount of training time a human listener would need in order to make sense of the cues. We demonstrate our technique on a dataset of 708 million authentication events over nine continuous months from an enterprise network. We illustrate a volume-centric approach in relation to the amplitude of the input data, and also a volumetric approach mapping the input data signal into the number of notes played. The resulting music prioritizes aesthetics over bandwidth to balance performance with adoption.
Sponsor
Date
2019-06
Extent
Resource Type
Text
Resource Subtype
Proceedings
Rights Statement
Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 4.0 International License.