As part of a broader organisational restructure, data networking research at Swinburne University of Technology has moved from the Centre for Advanced Internet Architecture (CAIA) to the Internet For Things (I4T) Research Lab.

Although CAIA no longer exists, this website reflects CAIA's activities and outputs between March 2002 and February 2017, and is being maintained as a service to the broader data networking research community.

L3DGEWorld 2.1

Overview

L3DGEWorld 2.1 is a data visualisation utility based on Open Arena, a GPL'd game that makes use of the Quake III Arena (Q3A) game engine. It was initially designed to be a network monitoring and control application, but can be easily use for other purposes by developing other input and output daemons [1]. The daemons provided with L3DGEWorld 2.1 allow monitoring and control of a live network to take place from within a virtual world created by the L3DGEWorld engine.

L3DGEWorld is the product of a research project aimed at simplifying two key network management tasks[2]:

  • The identification of anomalous traffic patterns within IP networks, and
  • The control of network elements (such as routers and firewalls) to block anomalous traffic.

L3DGEWorld 2.1, with the provided input and output daemons, creates a virtual world in which spinning objects represent the rate at which IP packets are heading towards particular, monitored IP addresses on your network. By using in-game techniques (in version 2.1 this involves 'shooting a gun at the spinning object') a network operator can initiate an ACL update to block undesired traffic. Our current implementation allows multiple participants to view and interact with the spinning network entities, and can require multiple participants to concurrently trigger ACL updates.

L3DGEWorld 2.1 also includes 8 new visual effects that can be applied in many combinations to the in-game entities, enabling many pieces of information to be conveyed to users simultaneously.

L3DGEWorld 2.1 defines a total of 10 unique entities that map and model makers can use to intuitively represent a number of distinctly different devices on the same map.

L3DGEWorld should run on any platform to which Open Arena has been ported, and the provided source code should make it easy to compile both the server and clients for unsupported platforms.

Included in this release is an updated version of greymatter, a FreeBSD-based application that monitors 'greynet' network traffic [3] and feeds real time information to L3DGEWorld. This new version uses a new UDP based protocol to convey updates to a L3DGEWorld server, allowing multiple daemons to run on multiple hosts, all feeding data into the server. L3DGEWorld itself does not specifically require greymatter, and may be fed real time traffic information from other external sources. [1]

What's New?

New features since L3DGEWorld 2.0 include:

  • New "bounce height" metric.
  • New "scale size" metric.
  • New "roll sideways" metric.
  • New "colour tint" metric.
  • New "bounce rate" metric.
  • New "play sound" metric.
  • New "alternate skin" metric.
  • New "alternate model" metric.
  • Entity updates now done over UDP.
  • Everything has been made more generic, to allow others to make use of L3DGEWorld for other purposes such as LCMON

Screenshots

Screen shot Screen shot
The network overview. Another Administrator marking a greynet host
to have an ACL Placed.
Screen shot Animation
Getting detailed information about the traffic to a particular
greynet host. The traffic shown came from nmap and scp.
An animation showing the greynet hosts
rotating at various speeds.
Screen shot
Many different visual metrics being used simultaneously.

Additional screenshots and videos depicting the metrics available in L3DGEWorld 2.1 can be found here.

System Requirements

L3DGEWorld and it's demonstration utility, fakematter, have been verified to run in some way, shape or form, on FreeBSD 6.2, Mac OS X 10.4.9, Linux (Ubuntu 7.04) and Windows XP Platforms (with the addition of cygwin). At this stage greymatter only runs on FreeBSD.

Client Requirements:

  • L3DGEWorld 2.1 distribution
  • libSDL and libOpenAL are required on Linux and FreeBSD
  • Q3A (and hence OpenArena) capable PC

Server Requirements:

  • L3DGEWorld 2.1 distribution
  • expect (http://expect.nist.gov/)
  • BASH (Bourne Again SHell)
  • Q3A dedicated server capable PC

greymatter (input daemon) requirements:

  • FreeBSD PC
  • libpcap

Documentation

Please see the files included in the tarball (available below) for further documentation.

Licensing

L3DGEWorld is copyright (C) 2007, the Centre for Advanced Internet Architectures, Swinburne University of Technology

L3DGEWorld is distributed under version 2 of the GNU General Public Licence.

Future Work

Planned features for future versions of L3DGEWorld include:

  • Maps may be made up of multiple rooms, with a certain number of points required to enter certain rooms (preventing lower level adminstrators from viewing areas of the network).
  • Other input and output daemons will be developed allowing the monitoring and controlling of a larger range of devices.
  • No, we really mean it! we are going to get around to this stuff one day.

Authors and Acknowledgments

  • Support for the development of L3DGEWorld is provided in part by a grant from the Cisco University Research Program Fund at Community Foundation Silicon Valley. The URP project, titled "Anomalous traffic detection and collaborative network configuration using 3D multiplayer game engines", is led by Associate Professor Grenville Armitage (CAIA) and supported by Fred Baker (Cisco).
  • L3DGEWorld 2.1 has been developed by Lucas Parry
  • The Greymatter input daemon was developed by Lucas Parry and Warren Harrop.
  • The `monitorhosts.sh' output daemon and associated files were thrown together by Lucas Parry.
  • We have recieved a lot of valuable feedback and testing by Grenville Armitage and Carl Javier.
  • Thanks to the OpenArena team, who's game made it possible for us to freely distribute L3DGEWorld as a whole product.

References

  1. L. Parry "L3DGEWorld 2.1 Input & Output Specifications", CAIA Tech Report, August 2007.
  2. W. Harrop, G. Armitage, "Real-Time Collaborative Network Monitoring and Control Using 3D Game Engines for Representation and Interaction," in VizSEC'06 Workshop on Visualization for Computer Security, Virginia, USA, October-November 2006.
  3. W. Harrop, G. Armitage "Defining and Evaluating Greynets (Sparse Darknets)", IEEE 30th Conference on Local Computer Networks (LCN 2005) Sydney, Australia, 15-17 November, 2005.

Download

L3DGEWorld 2.1.1 fixes a minor bug that slipped into the L3DGEWorld 2.1 release.

  • L3DGEWorld 2.1.1 for Windows, FreeBSD, Linux, and Mac OS X Download (46MB)
  • L3DGEWorld 2.1.1 Disk Image File for Mac (exactly the same contents as above, but in Mac disk image) Download (48MB)
  • MD5SUMS Download

Previous Versions

Listed below are links to previous versions of L3DGEWorld.

Go back to the L3DGE project main page


This page was lovingly hand-crafted in vim :P
Last Updated: Friday 22-Feb-2008 16:36:58 AEDT | No longer maintained. Pre-2018 was maintained and authorised by Grenville Armitage, garmitage@swin.edu.au