SoK

Abstract

Cyber situational awareness is an essential part of cyber defense that allows the cybersecurity operators to cope with the complexity of today's networks and threat landscape. Perceiving and comprehending the situation allow the operator to project upcoming events and make strategic decisions. In this paper, we recapitulate the fundamentals of cyber situational awareness and highlight its unique characteristics in comparison to generic situational awareness known from other fields. Subsequently, we provide an overview of existing research and trends in publishing on the topic, introduce front research groups, and highlight the impact of cyber situational awareness research. Further, we propose an updated taxonomy and enumeration of the components used for achieving cyber situational awareness. The updated taxonomy conforms to the widely-accepted three-level definition of cyber situational awareness and newly includes the projection level. Finally, we identify and discuss contemporary research and operational challenges, such as the need to cope with rising volume, velocity, and variety of cybersecurity data and the need to provide cybersecurity operators with the right data at the right time and increase their value through visualization.