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.

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L3DGEWorld V1.5

Overview

L3DGEWorld V1.5 is a plug-in modification for Open Arena, a GPL'd game based on the Quake III Arena (Q3A) game engine. L3DGEWorld allows monitoring and control of a live network to take place from within a virtual world created by the game engine. L3DGEWorld V1.5 supersedes the original L3DGEWorld V1.0 that was based on the commercial game Quake III Arena.

L3DGEWorld is the product of a research project aimed at simplifying two key network management tasks[1]:

• 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 currently 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 1.5 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 requires two participants to concurrently trigger any ACL updates.

L3DGEWorld will run on any platform to which Open Arena has been ported, and does not require the client or server binaries to be recompiled (when they are available).

Included in this release is greymatter, a FreeBSD-based application that monitors 'greynet' network traffic [2] and feeds real time information to L3DGEWorld. L3DGEWorld itself does not specifically require greymatter, and may be fed real time traffic information from other external sources. [3]

Screenshots

Network overview.	Marking a greynet hosts to have an ACL Placed.
Collaborating with another user, while getting detailed information about a greynet host.	An animation showing the greynet hosts rotating at various speeds.

System Requirements

L3DGEWorld and it's demonstration scripts have been verified to run on FreeBSD 6.2, Debian Linux (Lenny) and Windows XP Platforms (with the addition of cygwin). At this stage greymatter has only been verified to run on FreeBSD.

Client Requirements:

• Open Arena 0.6.0
• L3DGEWorld V1.5 distribution

Server Requirements:

• Open Arena 0.6.0
• L3DGEWorld V1.5 distribution
• expect (http://expect.nist.gov/)
• BASH (Bourne Again SHell)

Additionally standalone versions of L3DGEWorld 1.5 is also available for Windows and the various Unix platforms. They are based on Open Arena 0.6.0 with many of the unused resources removed to minimise file sizes.

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:

• Clients will be assigned differnet numbers of "points", so a higher level administrator may be able to place ACLs unaided.
• The number of "points" required to place ACLs for each Greynet Host will be configurable.
• Maps may be made up of multiple rooms, with a certian number of points required to enter certian rooms (preventing lower level adminstrators from viewing areas of the network).
• The remove ACL gun will become functional.
• Other input and output daemons will be developed allowing the monitoring and controlling of a larger range of devices.

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). This project has been made possible in part by a grant from the at Community Foundation Silicon Valley.
• L3DGEWorld V1.5 has been developed by Lucas Parry
• The Greymatter input daemon was developed by Warren Harrop.
• We have recieved a lot of valuable feedback and testing by Grenville Armitage.
• Thanks to Alex Shoolman, who's work on LTMON led into the start of L3DGEWorld.
• Thanks to the OpenArena team, who's game made it possible for us to freely distribute l3dgeworld as a whole product.
• Thanks to Blazej Kot, author of Q3SRCVIS, who's code helped Lucas greatly in understanding the Q3A source.

References

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. W. Harrop, L. Parry "L3DGEWorld 1.0 Input/Output Layer Specifications", CAIA Tech Report, April 2007.

Download

• The L3DGEWorld V1.5 Open Arena mod Download (2.8MB)
• L3DGEWorld V1.5 standalone for Windows Download (39.3MB)
• L3DGEWorld V1.5 standalone for Unix Download (33.2MB)
• Open Arena 0.6.0 for Windows Download (72.9MB)
• Open Arena 0.6.0 for Unix Download (78.5MB)

Go back to the L3DGE project main page