NAViewer (Network Activity Viewer)

The purpose of NAViewer is to provide web based visualition portal for Local Area Network (LAN) Activity.

System components are;

• Data provider agent for client nodes,
• Web server application to process data and serve gui,
• Database model to store collected data.

Data Provider Agent

Data Provider Agent will collect and post network traffic data to web server. Following data will be provided by each network packet captured by the agent:

• Receive Time,
• Packet Type,
• Source IP Address,
• Destination IP Address,
• Destination Port,
• Packet Length.

Data Provider Agent may be a bash script, or a python program.

Following command demonstrates how to collect desired data from command line:

# tcpdump -tt -n -S net 10.1.1.0/24

Web Server

Web server will have two basic functions:

• Web service for agents to post collected data,
• Graphical User Interface (GUI) for users to view network activity.

Using one of the following frameworks are mandatory for the web server:

• Node.js,
• Django,
• CherryPy,
• Flask

Web Service

Web service should allow network traffic information from multiple data provider agents to be submitted. Received data should be stored into a database.

JSON format should be used for network data. So, following example is given for a client data packet:

An ARP packet:

{
	"time" : "1400571514.320004",
	"type" : "ARP",
	"src_addr" : "10.1.1.32",
	"dst_addr" : "0.0.0.0",
	"dst_port" : -1,
	"length" : 46
}

An IP packet:

{
	"time" : "1400571514.687267",
	"type" : "IP",
	"src_addr" : "10.1.1.172",
	"dst_addr" : "10.1.1.255",
	"dst_port" : 1947,
	"length" : 40
}

Web GUI

Web GUI should be able to display,

• Overall network activity,
• Activity for a single client,
• Most active clients,
• Some discrimination for Local/Remote network addresses.

Activity display should be updated in real-time (asynchronously).

Database Model

Purpose of application is monitoring, not logging. So, database should not expand with time, but only with addresses. However, a time buffer will be needed just to display some past activity graph.

Above circumstances should be considered during database model design.

Development Environment Rules

• All python scripts should run in virtualenv.
• Git should be actively used for version control, not just with bulk commits for critical milestones.
• Personal editor and IDE preferences should not be committed in.
• Any intermediate or generated files should not be committed in.