What's going on?

From packet timing information, eXpose learns rules for network communication that may be spread across multiple hosts, protocols or applications that help with network monitoring, diagnosis, and intrusion detection with few false positives.

Abstract

Existing traffic analysis tools focus on traffic volume. They identify the heavy-hitters - flows that exchange high volumes of data, yet fail to identify the structure implicit in network traffic - do certain flows happen before, after or along with each other repeatedly over time? Since most traffic is generated by applications (web browsing, email, p2p), network traffic tends to be governed by a set of underlying rules. Malicious traffic such as network-wide scans for vulnerable hosts (mySQLbot) also presents distinct patterns.