Hayshark: A Web-Based System for Remote Visualization of Network Traffic

Abstract

Any computer or device connected to the Internet today will be exposed to a significant amount of network traffic from potentially thousands of different IP addresses. The vast majority of this traffic is entirely invisible to ordinary users. In this paper we introduce a system called Hayshark that can be used for visualizing and analyzing network traffic on a multitude of computing devices in a quick”at-a-glance” fashion. The Hayshark system constructs and dynamically maintains a live 3D graph representation of all incoming network traffic, and presents the data streams in a visual web-based user interface with force-directed graph layout. The user interface includes detailed message statistics and the ability to quickly dive deeper into individual streams if any anomalies are detected in their behavior.