For those who appreciate the healing power of music, new research could prove to be a magical security tool. By correlating traffic types from NetFlow logs with sounds of instruments, researchers at Imperva were able to translate changes in network traffic into song.
Inspired by a TED Talk called "Can We Create New Senses for Humans?" presented by Dr. David Eagleman, adjunct professor in the Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, Imperva's team wondered whether tapping into the sense of sound could change the way they interpret network traffic.
"Auditory perception, we learned, has a lot of advantages oversight, especially in terms of processing spatial, temporal and volumetric information. The ability to register the most delicate differences in frequency resolution and amplitude opens up a Pandora’s Box worth of possibilities in data perception," Imperva wrote in a blog post.
Turns out that sonification is an effective monitoring tool, so they set to work to figure out how to make the internet sing. In order to collect NetFlow data, they created a Python 3 script, then processed the data into Open Source Control messages which were then converted into sound using a Ruby-based algorithmic synthesizer.
Assigning different instrumental sounds to the varied traffic types created a melody that revealed the ebb and flow of the traffic levels and also revealed shifts in pitch and volume.
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