The real Tron: IT security as a shoot 'em up

ALERT to a sudden threat, you race down a virtual corridor of servers, hot on the tail of malicious software. You ping a message to your partner, pointing them to a bottleneck in the network which should let you pin down the malware and destroy it before it does any more harm. Doing your job has never been so much fun.

This is a long way away from traditional IT security, but the drama of video gaming actually enables analysts to watch over their networks more effectively. Developed at the Lincoln Laboratory, part of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the approach allows people to patrol their assigned environments as if they were playing a first-person shooter - much like in the cult film Tron.

Humans are important in network security because they are still more adept than algorithms at filtering out false alarms. The job typically involves scanning lists of IP addresses corresponding to the various computers in a network. Colour coding, symbols and graphs can help operators sift through the huge volumes of data for signs of intruders - unfamiliar IP addresses trying to access the network, for example. It's important work, but can be rather dull. A dramatic 3D environment means analysts can deal with far more data, says Jeremy Kepner of MIT.

His system, developed over the last three years with MIT colleague Matthew Hubbell, combines data from network access control systems with existing plans of the building that houses an organisation's computers. These are fed into a gaming engine called Unity, which generates a navigable 3D environment.

The analysts' avatars can teleport around the network they are assigned to protect, using a keyboard and mouse or a Playstation controller to investigate and block intrusions. If part of the network detects an anomaly and so seems to be under attack it flashes red, appears to catch fire or can even explode, using built-in animations. "Players" can then dash across the corporate complex and shut a machine down if it is under attack.

Other players show up in the game, allowing a team to cooperate in a way that is more natural than screen-sharing or teleconferencing. "Everyone can see everyone else," Kepner says. "You could say, 'Follow me while I walk over to this machine that's behaving weirdly', and people could be in physically different places while having this interaction."

Making the first-person shooter world seem realistic is key to making the "game" effective, says Kepner. "The moment I add all this context to the environment - grass, gravel, cars and buildings - it turns out that the amount of information we can push to the analysts is far greater," he says.

Kepner says the game was tested successfully on a 5000-machine network. It was presented at the IEEE High Performance Extreme Computing conference in Waltham, Massachusetts, last month.

Frank Zinghini, CEO of visualisation software company Applied Visions, says the concept of building real-world functions into a navigable 3D environment is "phenomenal". "The gameplay metaphor is very compelling to get people to interact with the work," he says.

Though players can't yet gun down the malware in hand-to-hand combat, that may not be far off. "The challenge isn't in the technology," says Zinghini. What is important is making the game as immersive as possible without compromising the work that network analysts do, he adds.

Turn training into gaming

Games can liven up dull tasks in all walks of life. A Boston firm called True Office has turned the compliance course, normally guaranteed to make an office worker's heart sink, into a comic-style app. The idea is that most people would rather learn about what constitutes sexual harassment by quizzing a virtual boss about her relationship with a handsome employee than trawl through tedious checklists and Powerpoint slides.

The US Department of Defense is also spicing up the training process. CyberCIEGE teaches network security concepts through a gamified office environment. Like The Sims for IT workers, networking mistakes can result in computers bursting into virtual flames.

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Webcam sunshine time = 3D model of your world

WANT a detailed three-dimensional model of your house or back garden? Just stick up a webcam and wait. Current 3D models of outdoor places, such as those seen in Google Earth, are typically created using laser scans or painstaking manual measurements. But anyone may soon be able to make one - using just daylight, time and a humble webcam.

It is all down to how sunlight bounces off surfaces differently at various times of year, as the relative position of the sun changes. "As the sun passes over the scene, different pixels will light up at different times," says Austin Abrams at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri. The software he and his colleagues created uses a GPS reading, which can be taken separately, and time-stamp data to calculate the position of the sun in relation to a webcam image. By watching how reflections change over the course of a few months, it can figure out the orientation of all the surfaces in the scene.

Google generates the 3D models that populate Google Earth by using a fleet of camera-equipped planes that fly over cities snapping photos. The program also lets users create their own 3D models of local buildings and upload them. Those models are kept simple to ensure that Google Earth runs smoothly. The researchers' models, by contrast, capture minute detail. "In some cases, we can even capture the 3D structure of individual shingles on a rooftop," says Abrams.

The new method cannot handle sudden changes in depth, however, such as a building with a mountain behind it in the far distance, because it calculates depth by comparing neighbouring pixels on the webcam images. The best models would result from combining the system's data with other techniques that are able to more accurately capture broader structures, says Gabriel Brostow, whose team does related research at University College London.

Abrams says the system could also help to automate the study of plants' life cycles. It is detailed enough to, say, pick up how the wooden structure of a tree changes over time. "We look forward to deploying this algorithm across the tens of thousands of webcams across the world," says Abrams. He will show the work at the European Conference on Computer Vision in Florence, Italy, next week.

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Firefly glow lights up better LEDs

LEDs of the future may owe their shine to one of nature's brightest sparks, the firefly, which uses its bioluminescence to attract a mate.

Many insects have evolved light-bending biological features. The figeater beetle's bright green iridescence is achieved by selectively reflecting light, and moths' eyes contain antireflective structures which boost light collection to let them go about their nocturnal lives. Like firefly bioluminescence, these features rely on tiny biological structures that selectively shift light either according to its colour or its polarisation. For example, if the wavelength of the incoming light matches size of the structures, it is reflected at odd angles, altering the perceived colour. The effect is similar to that of a diffraction grating or of polarised sunglasses.

Fireflies use this property to snag a mate: the brighter a firefly shines, the better its chances of attracting romantic attention. The light-bending nanostructures - known as lanterns, located on the outer surface of their light emitting organs - help send light into the environment efficiently by reducing the optical impedance between the air and lantern. This lets the insects maximise their light output while minimising their energy output. In all animals that rely on bioluminescence, efficient versions of these nanostructures have been selected for over hundreds of millions of years.

But researchers at the Biophotonics Lab of the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology found another use for them: a better LED lightbulb.

Led by Ki-Hun Jeong, the team measured the dimensions of the firefly nanostructures with an electron microscope, then built replica structures onto the surface of an LED lens. Their new LED lens transmitted 3 per cent more light than a traditional smooth lens, a small gain, but potentially significant in squeezing even more efficiency out of LED bulbs that are already dramatically more efficient than traditional incandescent bulbs.

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Health alert: lethal after-effects of hurricanes

 by Debora MacKenzie

For similar stories, visit the Hurricanes Topic Guide

The death toll from the superstorm that hit eastern North America this week continues to climb as more victims of wind, waves and downed electrical wires emerge. But storms and flooding on this scale cause illness and death long after the actual storm is over. The most obvious risks are injuries during the clean-up, as people try to demolish or rescue belongings from unstable structures. But some threats are more subtle.

What are the immediate risks?

Some depend on how long problems go on, because failures of different support systems, such as transport, electric power and medical care, start to affect each other. Refrigerated and frozen food will spoil in electricity outages, and people unable to get to shops might eat it, risking food poisoning – for which they may not be able to get medical care. In Manhattan, electric failure has stopped elevators and stranded people who cannot manage stairs in high-rise buildings, sometimes without water or necessary medicines.

Other risks are posed by carbon monoxide from small electric generators. In the longer term, mould and bacteria are likely to grow on persistently damp walls, especially in lightly damaged residential areas. Both can exacerbate or trigger asthma.

Do all the affected areas have good medical care?

Volunteer organisations like the Red Cross have been working flat out, but the disaster covers such a huge area that they have been spread thin. For example, people in Staten Island, where 19 have died as a result of the storm, say they're being ignored.

People most at risk now include those who need regular medical care, such as kidney dialysis, or those who suffer an emergency such as a heart attack. Transport is sparse, and some hospitals are stretched or shut.

This seems to be because vital equipment was located in basements that flooded, despite the publicity over a similar loss of back-up power at hospitals in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. New York University's Langone Medical Center lost one back-up generator, then the back-up to that one, because even though one of the generators was located prudently on a roof, its fuel pump was not.

What is the biggest health threat after a disaster like this?

The biggest is also one of the most overlooked, says Bruce Altevogt of the US Institute of Medicine's forum on medical preparedness for catastrophe: mental health.

"Research shows 30 to 40 per cent of disaster victims are at risk of a new mental disorder", especially depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, says Merritt Schreiber of the University of California at Irvine. Both can be debilitating, even fatal.

Schreiber has developed a tool for spotting those at risk early. Red Cross workers helping people displaced by Sandy are wearing cards around their necks, with a checklist developed for his PsySTART mental health triage system. "It doesn't help to ask people how they're feeling," says Schreiber, because right after a disaster, people who will bounce back feel as upset as those who will suffer long-term problems.

If people have experienced certain trials – separation from family, being trapped, severe panic or loss of home, for example – they are likely to need help.

Those people are identified by the volunteers and then earmarked for attention from a mental-health professional. Work with people who survived the 2005 London bombings showed that a few hours of cognitive therapy – which includes emotional and relaxation exercises and talking through specific anxieties – could prevent long-term psychological problems. "I want to get those people earlier through triage," says Schreiber.

What about all the rats in the New York subway?

Many New Yorkers think the notorious rodents were killed when floodwaters rushed into tunnels. Richard Ostfeld, a disease ecologist and rodent specialist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, New York, suspects that many of them survived by swimming and climbing.

That could be a problem. Between 30 and 60 per cent of the rats in any group carry a hantavirus called Seoul, similar to the one that struck Yosemite park in California earlier this year. "Higher prevalence in rats will mean higher transmission probabilities to people. So, an increase in human risk is plausible from the basic biology," says Ostfeld.

Moreover, with people dumping all that spoiled food from their darkened refrigerators, there might soon be many more rats in New York, rather than fewer. Clean-up crews would be advised to wear face-masks.

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