Skip to main content

Backhoe, a Packet Trace and Log Browser

  • Conference paper
Book cover Visualization for Computer Security (VizSec 2008)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 5210))

Included in the following conference series:

Abstract

We present Backhoe, a tool for browsing packet trace or other event logs that makes it easy to spot “statistical novelties” in the traffic, i.e. changes in the character of frequency distributions of feature values and in mutual relationships between pairs of features. Our visualization uses feature entropy and mutual information displays as either the top-level summary of the dataset or alongside the data. Our tool makes it easy to switch between absolute and conditional metrics, and observe their variations at a glance. We successfully used Backhoe for analysis of proprietary protocols.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

References

  1. Aslam, J., Bratus, S., Pavlu, V.: Semi-supervised data organization for interactive anomaly analysis. In: ICMLA 2006: Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Machine Learning and Applications, pp. 55–62 (2006)

    Google Scholar 

  2. Chow, C., Liu, C.: Approximating discrete probability distributions with dependence trees. In: IEEE Trans. Information Theory, vol. 14, pp. 462–467 (1968)

    Google Scholar 

  3. Conti, G.: Security Data Visualization: Graphical Techniques for Network Analysis. No Starch Press (2007)

    Google Scholar 

  4. Gu, Y., McCallum, A., Towsley, D.: Detecting anomalies in network traffic using maximum entropy estimation. In: IMC 2005: Proceedings of the 5th ACM SIGCOMM conference on Internet measurement, pp. 1–6 (2005)

    Google Scholar 

  5. Heer, J., Card, S.K., Landay, J.A.: Prefuse: a toolkit for interactive information visualization. In: CHI 2005: Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, pp. 421–430 (2005)

    Google Scholar 

  6. Keim, D.A.: Designing pixel-oriented visualization techniques: Theory and applications. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics 6(1), 59–78 (2000)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  7. Lakhina, A., Crovella, M., Diot, C.: Characterization of network-wide anomalies in traffic flows. In: IMC 2004: Proceedings of the 4th ACM SIGCOMM conference on Internet measurement, pp. 201–206 (2004)

    Google Scholar 

  8. Lee, W., Xiang, D.: Information-theoretic measures for anomaly detection. In: Proc. of the 2001 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, pp. 130–143 (2001)

    Google Scholar 

  9. Wattenberg, M.: Baby names, visualization, and social data analysis. In: INFOVIS 2005: Proceedings of the Proceedings of the 2005 IEEE Symposium on Information Visualization, p. 1 (2005)

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Editor information

John R. Goodall Gregory Conti Kwan-Liu Ma

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

About this paper

Cite this paper

Bratus, S., Hansen, A., Pellacini, F., Shubina, A. (2008). Backhoe, a Packet Trace and Log Browser. In: Goodall, J.R., Conti, G., Ma, KL. (eds) Visualization for Computer Security. VizSec 2008. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5210. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-85933-8_15

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-85933-8_15

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-85931-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-85933-8

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics