22 posts Posts by admin

Stanford Dissertation Browser

by on April 3, 2013, 0 comments

Stanford-Dissertation-Browser-electrical-engineering-625x608The Stanford Dissertation Browser is an interactive tool to explore similarities between different fields of study at Stanford University by examining the language used in the different PhD publications. Fields of study are arranged around a circle with one field of study in the centre. For the subject in the centre similarities with other fields are shown by the distance to the centre. The closer the circles, the more common the language these fields share.

For example, if you select Electrical Engineering the field Computational Science will move close to the centre, which is not a big surprise. When selecting Music, however, Computational Science also moves very close to the centre. Something you might not expect, at least not to this degree. With a slider at the bottom different years can be selected. The different years are shown all the time in the diagram by very subtle grey circles, which display year and field of study, if you hover over them. In this way you get an overview over the distribution over time and can get more details by moving the timeline slider to select specific years.

This way of visualizing a network is similar to the method the research group Research on Complex Systems at Northwestern University used in their visualization of the structural change in the international flight network. In a similar manner, one particular node was put into focus, surrounding nodes being closer to this node when these two nodes were strongly connected by many links. The same ist the case with the different fields of study. The more words they share, the more connections or links are there between these fields, moving them closer together.

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Visualizing connectivity of airports during Eyjafjallajökull eruption

by on April 3, 2013, 0 comments

Eyjafjalljökull2 The Engineering Sciences and Applied Mathematics department at Northwestern University hosts several research projects that deal with complex networks. One of these projects deals with the effect of the ash cloud covering Europe in April 2010 for several days. The reaearch group tried to shed light on the question in what way the event has changed the structure of the complex network that is formed by the flight connections by all the airports around the world. The way they did this was not by looking at the overall topology of the network, but rather by looking at single nodes, the different airports, and calculating their shortest-path length before and after the eruption. The shortest path doesn’t describe the geographical distance between two airports, but rather the connectivity between them. So the more flights occur between two airports, the shorter is its path.

These calculations are shown in a special kind of circular before-after diagrams with one particular airport in the centre of a red circle surrounded by dots that represent all the airports that are connected. It is not clear what exactly the red circle describes. According to the website it is the “approximate distance of the world from Atlanta”. However, it is clearly some kind of threshold. Looking at Atlanta airport before the event we can see that there are several airports within the red circle, mostly North-American, but also some big others like Frankfurt, London or Hongkong. After the event, however, these have been pushed out of the circle, while in general most of the other nodes have been pushed further away from the circle, thus increasing their shortest-path length.

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Fighters in a Patent War

by on April 3, 2013, 0 comments

PatentWarsThis network visualization by the New York Times shows patent suits of the ten biggest actors (like Apple, Samsung, Motorola etc.) in the mobile phone market. Suits between these ten companies are represented by orange arrows, while suits against one of the ten companies by other parties are colored grey and suits of one company against other parties have a blue color. These other parties are not more specifically detailed. The total amount of different arrows one company has are arranged in a circle with the effect that the cirle becomes bigger, the more incoming or outgoing suits one company has.

This visualization caught my attention primarily because of the arrangement of the arrows. Thinking of computer networks different segments of the circle could visually encode different ports and their connections in a network. Further research is needed to investigate, if this might prove helpful for security administrators.
Also, for such a visualization it might be more revealing to put more emphasis on the direction of the connections, e.g. by color. Differentiating the direction only by the little arrowhead, as we can observe in the New York Times graphic is a little hard to recognize. For applications such as monitoring a network these kinds of weak differentiations are not enough.

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The Power Rank

by on March 12, 2013, 0 comments

ThePowerNode

The Power Rank is a visualization of the chances of winning for all the basketball teams participating in the NCAA Tournament. The teams are organized around a circle grouped by the region they are from. In the center of the circle you can see all the games of the tournament represented by dots. These are connected to the different teams that could possibly take part in the game. When hovering over these dots, the teams get highlighted  and the probability of being the winner of this particular game is shown at the team’s label with a percentage value. You can also hover over particular teams to show what the corresponding chances of winning are in the different games leading to the final (which is the dot in the middle).

This visualization is rather uncommon in that it shows a hierarchy in the middle of the circle with a treelike structure. Of course this is a visualization that can handle only a certain amount of data because the space is limited by the circle.

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NICT Daedalus Cyber-Attack Alert System

by on March 4, 2013, 0 comments

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=3u5u5A8_SE0#at=77

The National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT)  a Japanese research institute focussing on different areas in the field of ICT has developed a system for detecting and visualizing attacks on networks. Information about attacks and possible alerts is presented in a rather sophisticated visual way.

There is not a lot of information about the project except a short text and a video showing the system in action. According to the video, the Internet is represented by a wireframed 3D globe in the middle of the screen surrounded by several donut charts each one representing a network. The donut chart shows with two colors (black and blue) which IP-adresses are used (blue) and which ones are not used. Alerts associated with certain IP-sources and -destinations are marked on the donut chart with a sign. These can be clicked to get more details about the alert. The application is supposed to be used in conjunction with a security system, so it’s not a standalone SIEM or something comparable.

There is not more information about how to interact with the system. It seems interaction with the system is rather limited, functioning more as a general visual overview. Though it’s an interesting visualization, I think a question about the practical quality of the system might be justified. It seems like without the ability to filter the visual representation by certain attributes it might be difficult to differentiate important information from negligible. Also, it’s not clear why they use a wireframe globe to show connections to the web. Without the geographical information it seems rather odd because lines going to certain points on the globe don’t provide you with additional useful information. Another question arises when looking at the donut charts: What does the position of IP-adresses on the ring segment express? Is it random? Might have been helpful to show the actual network topology or show the network structure by other visual means in a simpler manner, so we could see which parts of a network are attacked by what countries for example.

 

Security Log Visualization with a Correlation Engine

by on February 7, 2013, 0 comments

On the 28th Chaos Communication Congress organized by Chaos Computer Club in Berlin, network security specialist Chris Kubecka talks about how correlation and visualization of network log data from different devices can support the process of finding potential threats and malware. Usually a network is comprised of a variety of different devices that each generates log files in its own format. Having a separate console for each of these devices

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LogRhythm

by on February 7, 2013, 0 comments

LogRhythm

LogRhythm is a SIEM that can be applied either in smaller organizations as a single software instance or in midsize to large organizations as a combination of different software applications. It offers log management, event management, reporting, user and file integrity monitoring. The product is easily and quickly deployed due to a helpful configuration wizard. Though LogRhythm is capable of event correlation, compared to its competitors it’s very basic and optimized for the most common use cases. Gartner has positioned the product in their Magic Quadrant for Security Information and Event Management as one of the leaders.

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Sentinel, Security Manager (NetIQ)

by on February 6, 2013, 0 comments

NetIQ Sentinel

The company NetIQ offers two SIEM solutions: Sentinel and Security Manager. Sentinel is a product originally offered by Novell. With the recent acquisition of the company by NetIQ there are two products overlapping in their functionality. In the future all functionality will be merged into the Sentinel solution. Sentinel’s strength lies in event correlation and real-time event management. Security Manager lacks this functionality and focuses more on host- and agentbased monitoring capabilities for server platforms, something missing in most SIEMs. Sentinel is a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant 2012

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Enterprise Security Manager (McAfee)

by on February 6, 2013, 0 comments

McAfee NitroSecurityMcAfee NitroSecurity 2

McAfee NitroSecurity is a software that offers SIEM functionality and log management in one single tool separating it from other SIEM systems. It is scalable and has a high performance, which makes it especially useful for organizations that need to analyse huge numbers of events. The company itself emphasizes the speed of the product as an outstanding feature. It is one of the five products positioned as leader in the Magic Quadrant for Security Information and Event Management.

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Q1 Labs (IBM)

by on February 6, 2013, 0 comments

IBM offers an extensive security system solution called Q1 Labs. This includes several products for different security aspects, like, for example, QRadar Log Manager for collecting, archiving and analyzing network and security event logs or QRadar SIEM for real-time analysis of security alerts and correlating data from different sources to detect any threats. The product distinguishes itself from other products by its ability to collect and process NetFlow data, by deep packet inspection (DPI) and behavior analysis for all supported event sources. According to Gartner it can be considered one of the leaders in the field (Gartner 2012).

QRadar SIEM Dashboard

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