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Existence Plots: A Low-Resolution Time Series for Port Behavior Analysis

White Paper
In this paper, Jeff Janies introduces the existence plot as a visualization and discuss its use in gaining insight into a host's behavior.
Publisher

Software Engineering Institute

Abstract

This white paper was presented at VizSec '08, the Symposium on Visualization for Cyber Security, which took place in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in September 2008.

An existence plot is a low-resolution visualization that concurrently represents the activity of all 216 ports on a single host. By doing so, we are able to show patterns of port usage which can indicate server activity and demonstrate scanning. In this work, we introduce the existence plot as a visualization and discuss its use in gaining insight into a host's behavior.