Cybersecurity analysts deal with a huge amount of data, especially when monitoring network
“This is an ocean of data,” saysYang Tsai, senior researcher at CyLab, in an interview for Carnegie Mellon University. “The important patterns we need to see are hidden beneath a lot of trivial or normal patterns.”
Tsai has worked for years to find ways to alleviatedetecting deviations in network traffic. Several years ago, he and his research group developed a data visualization tool that allows you to visually perceive network traffic patterns. Now the scientist has developed a way to hear them.
In a new study presentedThis week at the Applied Human Factors and Ergonomics Conference, Yang Tsai and two co-authors showed how cybersecurity data can be heard in the form of music. When network traffic changes, the melody also changes.
Two of Tsai's co-authors on the study are professional musicians—Jakub Polaczyk and Caitlin Croft were once students at Carnegie Mellon University's College of Fine Arts.
“We planned to learn how to find anomaliesin network data, transforming it into musical form. Using sound to perceive information is not a new practice, but the world has not yet had solutions similar to ours,” noted Yang Tsai, adding that CyLab specialists had to experiment with different data transformation algorithms before obtaining the result.
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