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Modifying first person shooter games to perform real time network monitoring and control tasks

Published: 30 October 2006 Publication History

Abstract

This paper describes how a first person shooter (FPS) game engine can be leveraged for monitoring and control of enterprise IP data networks. Network administration can then occur in the following manner: network events (such as port scans or packets hitting a darknet) are translated in real time to various changes in the 3D game world state. Network administrators, logged in as 'players', can then collaboratively detect anomalous network events using the visual and aural cues given by the game. Using the native interaction metaphors from within the game (such as shooting, using or healing) they can then instantiate network administration policy changes (such as network layer firewall rules) directly back onto the running network without the need for interactions with complicated command line interfaces. We explore the possibilities offered by modern 3D game engines to implement this scheme as a server-side 'mod'. Finally, we detail the modifications made to the open source game engine 'Cube' to allow both the visualisation of large amounts of live network data within a virtual environment and support interacting with this data to create network administration events.

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Cited By

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  • (2010)EdenProceedings of the 23nd annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology10.1145/1866029.1866049(109-118)Online publication date: 3-Oct-2010
  • (2007)Wildlife net-gamekeepers using sensor networkProceedings of the 6th ACM SIGCOMM workshop on Network and system support for games10.1145/1326257.1326269(67-69)Online publication date: 19-Sep-2007

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cover image ACM Conferences
NetGames '06: Proceedings of 5th ACM SIGCOMM workshop on Network and system support for games
October 2006
350 pages
ISBN:1595935894
DOI:10.1145/1230040
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 30 October 2006

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Author Tags

  1. 3D
  2. NIDS
  3. game modification
  4. greynet
  5. intrusion detection
  6. network control
  7. network monitoring
  8. real-time
  9. visualization

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View all
  • (2010)EdenProceedings of the 23nd annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology10.1145/1866029.1866049(109-118)Online publication date: 3-Oct-2010
  • (2007)Wildlife net-gamekeepers using sensor networkProceedings of the 6th ACM SIGCOMM workshop on Network and system support for games10.1145/1326257.1326269(67-69)Online publication date: 19-Sep-2007

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