Traffic Mining, feel the packets, be the packets

Abstract

The IP network introduced a new quality of threat when real infrastructures such as telecom, electrical, transport and banking systems were infiltrated by the virtual world with its standard PC HW and SW. Unnecessary high complexity, instable behaviour and a new kind of criminal activity arose, the targeted IT warfare. SW became an end in itself and a weapon. Nevertheless, we allowed and promoted the current situation violating the most basic principles of reliable design, testing and robustness. The general acceptance of product selection solemnly by economic and political factors demands now its toll. The talk will address reasons for todays calamity and motivates the current civil and military research efforts to solve the most urgent problems on a short and long time scale. It will also supply a short insight into the practice of Infrastructure Troubleshooting and Traffic Mining with regard to the danger of todays trust in tools instead of decent human knowledge. It will teach the audience the potential of the human brain, mining in IP data streams using KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) tools on selected examples, such as Skype or VPN Tunnels. The positive magic of critical thinking, proper preprocessing and visually exploring of datasets will be demonstrated. Finally, the dark side, negative magic of spin doctors manipulating our brains by just throwing raw data at statistic tools or artificial intelligence producing any kind of nonsense will be shortly discussed.