Abstract
Network intrusion (the unauthorized access to a computer system perpetrated by persons or a piece of software) is a major concern of network administrators. Carrying out network intrusion detection (NID) manually is a tiring, complex and time-consuming task, often overloading the visual sensory channel. To overcome this, real-time auditory alarms and auditory information provide immediate feedback, helping to identify trends or patterns of the attacks in network logs and in real-time network accesses, allowing professionals make rapid decisions, thus representing an interesting alternative to conventional NID. The purpose of this chapter is to describe literature research on the benefits and challenges of Auditory Display (the use of non-speech sound to represent meaningful information at a computer interface) applied to wireless, wired, and mobile network intrusion detection. This chapter also highlights further work on Auditory Display and multimodal interfaces to support intrusion detection in wireless mesh networks.
TopBackground
Auditory Display can be defined as an area of computer science that studies how non-speech sounds are designed and applied to represent meaningful information in a computer interface (Kramer, 1994). Sounds can be very effective in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) for discriminating data patterns, identifying trends in information, mapping complex data, complementing or supplementing other sensory channels, and representing alarms, among other applications, as long as the sounds are adequately designed and adapted to the computer interface. This can be done by following well-established auditory and HCI guidelines and principles (Brewster et al., 1995). However, sounds can be unpleasant if they are played too loud, or distract persons who are nearby (Shneiderman & Plaisant, 2004). Sonification (also called auralization) is the action of mapping data onto parameters of non-verbal sound, such as volume, pitch, timbre, duration, frequency, amplitude, and rhythm in a computer interface (Kramer et al., 1997). Several experimental and empirical studies have demonstrated the effectiveness and efficacy of auditory feedback (AF) in computer interfaces. For example, Brewster (1997) found that sound is effective to solve the problem of visualization overload, where AF acted as complementary information for the visual sensory channel.