Data Driven Acceptable Use Policy
PROJECT TYPE: DATA DRIVEN POLICY
Tools and Programming Language: Wireshark, PowerPoint
BACKGROUND/ CONTEXT
The last semester, final year as an undergrad; my project was focused on the analysis of key metrics of Mobile Networks as measured from the end users’ devices. This set the foundation to be involved in the project. Late 2017, my final year supervisor reached out to me asking If I would be willing to participate in the analysis of the University’s WAN traffic. I had little experience with the tools required, but I wasn’t going to let a learning opportunity pass me by. I jumped on it
PROCESS
The network engineer that led the team had configured one of the backbone routers of the network infrastructure to have one of its port in promiscuous mode. In lay terms, it means every network traffic (both incoming and outgoing) was copied to any device connected to this port. This network data was collected for over a period of 3 months. The next phase was analyzing this data to create a baseline. A baseline is a pattern denoting what normal network traffic should look like.
Baselining can be performed with different software. We used Wireshark as it was open sourced, free, really powerful, easy to extend and could help create easy to understand network graphs. However, there was just a small glitch, I needed to upgrade my expertise in using Wireshark to tackle a dataset of this size. I was used to dataset of a few 100MB, not 100GB and more. Beautiful, this thing called “the web”. The web taught me and practically tutored me via videos, tutorials and reading material preparing me for the Wireshark Certified Network Analyst exam. I felt like an assured world class rookie.
RESULT
Confident in my new found skill, I was able to analyze this dataset. Having the skill is one side of the equation, the other side is distilling the insights found into policies. The team, including the engineers, my supervisor, myself and backing from stakeholders, were able to draft an Internet Acceptable Use Policy.