Hack like the Movie Stars: A Big-Screen Multi-Touch Network Monitor

Presented at DEF CON 17 (2009), Aug. 2, 2009, 11 a.m. (20 minutes).

You know all those movies where exaggerated nerd-types accomplish impossible hacking feats using a ridiculous, big-screen friendly, animated graphical interface where they appear to fly through the network, performing complicated tasks with the flick of their finger? You thought to yourself, "Wow, that's impractical and useless". But somewhere, deep down, some part of you thought it was pretty sweet. That's why we built one. We call it DVNE. We'll be presenting a prototype rear-projection multi-touch interface for exploring and interacting with networks backed by a signature-based network monitor. We'll talk about the technology behind multi-touch, our network monitor, and some of the shiny but totally impractical features we're incorporating. And, assuming the airlines cooperate, we'll be running a live demo as well.

Presenters:

  • George Louthan - Research Assistant, University of Tulsa
    George Louthan is a Masters student at the University of Tulsa. His research interests include network security and monitoring, enterprise security management, and lately security engineering. He has spoken recently about the role of signature-based network protocol identification in modern networks and contributed to the development of a protocol identification system nicknamed SAND.
  • Cody Pollet - Research Assistant, University of Tulsa
    Cody Pollet is a Ph.D. student at the University of Tulsa whose research interests focus on information visualization and human-computer interaction. He received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in computer science also from the University of Tulsa. As part of his thesis work he created MoDL, a middleware system designed to simplify synthesis and visualization of data in arbitrary formats.

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