TL:DR;
Botronica began as an internal Kasada hackathon project.
Our hypothesis was - cyberattacks are a silent crime, how can we make them loud enough for all to hear?
We set out to explore the sonification of our attack data in order to create unique soundscapes that can allow us to experience these attacks from a different perspective compared to traditional data visualisation.
Listen
Development
We started by doing a deep dive into data sonification research, looking at prior work including general sonification, sonification in security, as well as existing technologies we could leverage. Eventually, after converting the request data into midi format, we used Tone.js to play midi in the browser and apply different instruments and audio effects per instrument.
We built the UI and began to experiment with the playing of various music formats using custom synths and settings. After multiple interactions, we are able to make the traffic data sound tolerable while accentuating the anomalies in the resulting soundscape.
What’s Next?
We are looking at adding more instruments and genres, while allowing the user to customize these on the fly. We are exploring how we can better highlight anomalies as we believe Botronica will have practical uses when applied to monitoring and detection of malicious traffic.
Finally, we are now experimenting with audio visualization techniques to produce 3D attack simulations. Leveraging tools such as WebGL and D3js to post-process midi files will allow us to see cyberattacks as 3D soundscapes, in addition to hearing them.