Friends, for the past five-plus years I’ve been publishing free data “feeds” of unsolicited Internet activity such as SSH password authentication login attempts under the umbrella website Dataplane.org. This effort arose out of the ashes of an earlier, now defunct project that operated quite a bit differently. For example, the roughly 200 hosts that make up the Dataplane.org distributed sensor network are systems I pay for and manage. There have been no volunteers, just me.
I’ve been told the Dataplane.org feeds are among the best and most reliable available in security community. A number of organizations regularly fetch the feeds and incorporate them into their alerting systems and commercial solutions. Research has been conducted examining how comprehensive the feeds coverage is. So far so good!
More recently, Dataplane.org has also been a unique and successful platform for measurement research and experiments as I pursue my PhD. Dataplane.org is on the cusp of being an important provider of data, analysis, and statistics to not just me, but a larger Internet community. Now the time has come to take Dataplane.org to the next level.
A long-time friend and colleague of mine, Matt Kemp, has joined the project. He brings with him a wealth of technical and managerial experience. He shares my interest in doing cool things and sees in Dataplane.org an opportunity to broaden it’s appeal beyond my geeky network and security contacts. Yes, this means we are looking at potential revenue streams to help fund, improve, and grow what Dataplane.org does.
The most noticeable, immediate change will be the redesigned web pages. I know my 20th century ASCII and HTML web design is truly to be envied, but it is time to let the original web pages ride off into the dustbin of history.
Next, we are hard at work figuring out all the formalities of making what has been a hobby project by a single individual into something resembling a serious organization. We are not even sure what this will look like yet. Initially, we planned to become a U.S. 501(c)(3) designated non-profit, but we will see what our accountant and lawyer will advise as we map out a vision for the future.
Then there are literally dozens of technical tasks and projects we have in mind. From improving the existing infrastructure to expanding what kinds of data we work with, there is a litany of TODOs. One big technical task at the top of our list is to provide a search API into Dataplane.org’s vast repository of data, some of which has never been made available. This is currently in progress and is one of our highest priorities.
Tech TODO list:
Website redesignAPI-based data search
TCP-specific DNS signals
SSH id/password signals
. . .
The 7-day window of feed data, which we are now calling Signals will remain freely available for download without restriction. There will be more of this sort of thing to come. There will likely be some other things that might not be freely available. This is all part of the process to see what is possible and what might reasonably help fund us to get to that next level. None of this will happen without reactions from readers like you. Tell us what you think.