Hearing the internet background radiation

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Presented at BSidesCapetown 2018 by

Network telescopes provide key insight into various large scale internetevents that take place, and are a key focusing ring for the identificationof strange request behaviour. The traffic that these telescopes see is oftenreferred to internet background radiation. When visualising data, theability of a researcher to draw meaning from the events presented is limitedby the projection of the data. While 3 dimensional space can be projectedonto a 2D plane, this still limits the amount of information we can processwhen looking at a visualisation.Data sonification might provide a higher dimensional medium withwhich to investigate data. 3D audio spatialisation, combined with am-plitude and spectral manipulation allows for an interesting approach toanalysing network telescope data. This sonification technique can be usedto identify and investigate events captured by telescopes, such as variousforms of scanning, malware and other unsolicited traffic.In this presentation we will discuss methods of sonifying telescopedata. In particular we will look into a spatialisation technique known asAmbisonics, and how this can be used as a spatial projection method todenote packet origins and data flows. We will also determine mappings ofpacket parameters to audio processes that define the timbre, tonality andmood of the sonification to aid in analysis.This presentation will cover various techniques that are used makethe identification of network events within sonified data recognisable to alistener. Since hearing is different to seeing, this method can be used inconjunction with visual rendering techniques to provide enriched analysisof data.