Visual Correlation of Host Processes and Network Traffic

  • Authors:
  • Glenn A. Fink;Paul Muessig;Chris North

  • Affiliations:
  • Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University;Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University;Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

  • Venue:
  • VIZSEC '05 Proceedings of the IEEE Workshops on Visualization for Computer Security
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

Anomalous communication patterns are one of the leading indicators of computer system intrusions according to the system administrators we have interviewed. But a major problem is being able to correlate across the host/network boundary to see how network connections are related to running processes on a host. This paper introduces Portall, a visualization tool that gives system administrators a view of the communicating processes on the monitored machine correlated with the network activity in which the processes participate. Portall is a prototype of part of the Network Eye framework we have introduced in an earlier paper [1]. We discuss the Portall visualization, the supporting infrastructure it requires, and a formative usability study we conducted to obtain administrators' reactions to the tool.