Cybersecurity analysts deal with enormous amounts of data, especially when monitoring network traffic. Printed out, a single day's worth of network traffic may rival a thick phonebook. Detecting an abnormality is like finding a needle in a haystack.
"It's an ocean of data," said Yang Cai (left), a senior systems scientist in Carnegie Mellon University's CyLab. "The important patterns we need to see become buried."
Cai has been working for years to come up with ways to make abnormalities in network traffic easier to spot. Previously, he and his research group developed a data visualization tool that allowed users to see network traffic patterns, and now he has developed a way to hear them.
In a new study presented at the International Conference on Applied Human Factors and Ergonomics, Cai and two co-authors showed how cybersecurity data can be heard in the form of music. When there's a change in the network traffic, there is a change in the music.
"We wanted to articulate normal and abnormal patterns through music," Cai said. "The process of sonification — using audio to perceptualize data — is not new, but sonification to make data more appealing to the human ear is."
