{"title":"Unlocking user-centered design methods for building cyber security visualizations","authors":"Sean McKenna, D. Staheli, Miriah D. Meyer","doi":"10.1109/VIZSEC.2015.7312771","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/VIZSEC.2015.7312771","url":null,"abstract":"User-centered design can aid visualization designers to build better, more practical tools that meet the needs of cyber security users. The cyber security visualization research community can adopt a variety of design methods to more efficiently and effectively build tools. We demonstrate how previous cyber visualization research has omitted a discussion of effectiveness and process in the explanation of design methods. In this paper, we discuss three design methods and illustrate how each method informed two real-world cyber security visualization projects which resulted in successful deployments to users.","PeriodicalId":240847,"journal":{"name":"2015 IEEE Symposium on Visualization for Cyber Security (VizSec)","volume":"105 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-10-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132176070","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"SNAPS: Semantic network traffic analysis through projection and selection","authors":"B. Cappers, J. V. Wijk","doi":"10.1109/VIZSEC.2015.7312768","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/VIZSEC.2015.7312768","url":null,"abstract":"Most network traffic analysis applications are designed to discover malicious activity by only relying on high-level flow-based message properties. However, to detect security breaches that are specifically designed to target one network (e.g., Advanced Persistent Threats), deep packet inspection and anomaly detection are indispensible. In this paper, we focus on how we can support experts in discovering whether anomalies at message level imply a security risk at network level. In SNAPS (Semantic Network traffic Analysis through Projection and Selection), we provide a bottom-up pixel-oriented approach for network traffic analysis where the expert starts with low-level anomalies and iteratively gains insight in higher level events through the creation of multiple selections of interest in parallel. The tight integration between visualization and machine learning enables the expert to iteratively refine anomaly scores, making the approach suitable for both post-traffic analysis and online monitoring tasks. To illustrate the effectiveness of this approach, we present example explorations on two real-world data sets for the detection and understanding of potential Advanced Persistent Threats in progress.","PeriodicalId":240847,"journal":{"name":"2015 IEEE Symposium on Visualization for Cyber Security (VizSec)","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-10-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130344083","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Visual analytics for cyber red teaming","authors":"Joseph Yuen, B. Turnbull, Justin Hernandez","doi":"10.1109/VIZSEC.2015.7312765","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/VIZSEC.2015.7312765","url":null,"abstract":"Our team is currently developing an Automated Cyber Red Teaming system that, when given a model-based capture of an organisation's network, uses automated planning techniques to generate and assess multi-stage attacks. Specific to this paper, we discuss our development of the visual analytic component of this system. Through various views that display network attacks paths at different levels of abstraction, our tool aims to enhance cyber situation awareness of human decision makers.","PeriodicalId":240847,"journal":{"name":"2015 IEEE Symposium on Visualization for Cyber Security (VizSec)","volume":"86 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-10-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115798798","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Visualizing the insider threat: challenges and tools for identifying malicious user activity","authors":"P. Legg","doi":"10.1109/VIZSEC.2015.7312772","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/VIZSEC.2015.7312772","url":null,"abstract":"One of the greatest challenges for managing organisational cyber security is the threat that comes from those who operate within the organisation. With entitled access and knowledge of organisational processes, insiders who choose to attack have the potential to cause serious impact, such as financial loss, reputational damage, and in severe cases, could even threaten the existence of the organisation. Security analysts therefore require sophisticated tools that allow them to explore and identify user activity that could be indicative of an imminent threat to the organisation. In this work, we discuss the challenges associated with identifying insider threat activity, along with the tools that can help to combat this problem. We present a visual analytics approach that incorporates multiple views, including a user selection tool that indicates anomalous behaviour, an interactive Principal Component Analysis (iPCA) tool that aids the analyst to assess the reasoning behind the anomaly detection results, and an activity plot that visualizes user and role activity over time. We demonstrate our approach using the Carnegie Mellon University CERT Insider Threat Dataset to show how the visual analytics workflow supports the Information-Seeking mantra.","PeriodicalId":240847,"journal":{"name":"2015 IEEE Symposium on Visualization for Cyber Security (VizSec)","volume":"73 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-10-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127387466","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
C. Gray, Panagiotis D. Ritsos, Jonathan C. Roberts
{"title":"Contextual network navigation to provide situational awareness for network administrators","authors":"C. Gray, Panagiotis D. Ritsos, Jonathan C. Roberts","doi":"10.1109/VIZSEC.2015.7312769","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/VIZSEC.2015.7312769","url":null,"abstract":"One of the goals of network administrators is to identify and block sources of attacks from a network steam. Various tools have been developed to help the administrator identify the IP or subnet to be blocked, however these tend to be non-visual. Having a good perception of the wider network can aid the administrator identify their origin, but while network maps of the Internet can be useful for such endeavors, they are difficult to construct, comprehend and even utilize in an attack, and are often referred to as being “hairballs”. We present a visualization technique that displays pathways back to the attacker; we include all potential routing paths with a best-efforts identification of the commercial relationships involved. These two techniques can potentially highlight common pathways and/or networks to allow faster, more complete resolution to the incident, as well as fragile or incomplete routing pathways to/from a network. They can help administrators re-profile their choice of IP transit suppliers to better serve a target audience.","PeriodicalId":240847,"journal":{"name":"2015 IEEE Symposium on Visualization for Cyber Security (VizSec)","volume":"98 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-10-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121763292","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Dustin L. Arendt, R. Burtner, D. Best, Nathan D. Bos, J. Gersh, C. Piatko, C. L. Paul
{"title":"Ocelot: user-centered design of a decision support visualization for network quarantine","authors":"Dustin L. Arendt, R. Burtner, D. Best, Nathan D. Bos, J. Gersh, C. Piatko, C. L. Paul","doi":"10.1109/VIZSEC.2015.7312763","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/VIZSEC.2015.7312763","url":null,"abstract":"Most cyber security research is focused on detecting network intrusions or anomalies through the use of automated methods, exploratory visual analytics systems, or real-time monitoring using dynamic visual representations. However, there has been minimal investigation of effective decision support systems for cyber analysts. This paper describes the user-centered design and development of a decision support visualization for active network defense. Ocelot helps the cyber analyst assess threats to a network and quarantine affected computers from the healthy parts of a network. The described web-based, functional visualization prototype integrates and visualizes multiple data sources through the use of a hybrid space partitioning tree and node link diagram. We describe our design process for requirements gathering and design feedback which included expert interviews, iterative design, and a user study.","PeriodicalId":240847,"journal":{"name":"2015 IEEE Symposium on Visualization for Cyber Security (VizSec)","volume":"257 21","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-10-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"113983259","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"PERCIVAL: proactive and reactive attack and response assessment for cyber incidents using visual analytics","authors":"M. Angelini, N. Prigent, G. Santucci","doi":"10.1109/VIZSEC.2015.7312764","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/VIZSEC.2015.7312764","url":null,"abstract":"Situational awareness is a key concept in cyber-defence. Its goal is to make the user aware of different and complex aspects of the network he or she is monitoring. This paper proposes PERCIVAL, a novel visual analytics environment that contributes to situational awareness by allowing the user to understand the network security status and to monitor security events that are happening on the system. The proposed visualization allows for comparing the proactive security analysis with the actual attack progress, providing insights on the effectiveness of the mitigation actions the system has triggered against the attack and giving an overview of the possible attack's evolution. Moreover, the same visualization can be fruitfully used in the proactive analysis since it allows for getting details on computed attack paths and evaluating the mitigation actions that have been proactively computed by the system. A preliminary user study provided a positive feedback on the prototype implementation of the system. A video of the system is available at: https://youtu.be/uMpYCJCX95k.","PeriodicalId":240847,"journal":{"name":"2015 IEEE Symposium on Visualization for Cyber Security (VizSec)","volume":"45 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-10-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114930540","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A visual analytics loop for supporting model development","authors":"S. Walton, E. Maguire, Min Chen","doi":"10.1109/VIZSEC.2015.7312767","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/VIZSEC.2015.7312767","url":null,"abstract":"Threats in cybersecurity come in a variety of forms, and combating such threats involves handling a huge amount of data from different sources. It is absolutely necessary to use algorithmic models to defend against these threats. However, all models are sensitive to deviation from the original contexts in which the models were developed. Hence, it is not really an overstatement to say that `all models are wrong'. In this paper, we propose a visual analytics loop for supporting the continuous development of models during their deployment. We describe the roles of three types of operators (monitors, analysts and modelers), present the visualization techniques used at different stages of model development, and demonstrate the utility of this approach in conjunction with a prototype software system for corporate insider threat detection. In many ways, our environment facilitates an agile approach to the development and deployment of models in cybersecurity.","PeriodicalId":240847,"journal":{"name":"2015 IEEE Symposium on Visualization for Cyber Security (VizSec)","volume":"59 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-10-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123684637","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Discovery of rating fraud with real-time streaming visual analytics","authors":"Kodzo Wegba, Aidong Lu","doi":"10.1109/VIZSEC.2015.7312770","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/VIZSEC.2015.7312770","url":null,"abstract":"The rating fraud in online e-commerce stores targets at receiving large revenues through boosting the popularity of selected items with fake ratings. The challenges of detecting rating frauds come from discovering small scale abnormal activities in a large amount of data and detecting frauds in a time-critical manner from online rating streams. This paper presents a real-time visual analytics system that consists of two essential components: a server for automatically handling data streams and a visual analytics interface for performing interactive analysis. Based on the features of rating frauds, we present a detection solution which balances computationally expensive algorithms and interactive analysis between the server and analysts. Specifically, our detection system filters data through performing an initial suspicion level detection on the server, and analysts can combine different statistical analysis of the user / item matrix through a co-mapped singular value decomposition (SVD) diagram, re-ordered matrix representation, and the temporal view. We demonstrate our approach with case studies of different fraud scenarios and show that rating frauds can be effectively detected.","PeriodicalId":240847,"journal":{"name":"2015 IEEE Symposium on Visualization for Cyber Security (VizSec)","volume":"7 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-10-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127645351","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Ensemble visualization for cyber situation awareness of network security data","authors":"L. Hao, C. Healey, Steve E. Hutchinson","doi":"10.1109/VIZSEC.2015.7312766","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/VIZSEC.2015.7312766","url":null,"abstract":"Network security analysis and ensemble data visualization are two active research areas. Although they are treated as separate domains, they share many common challenges and characteristics. Both focus on scalability, time-dependent data analytics, and exploration of patterns and unusual behaviors in large datasets. These overlaps provide an opportunity to apply ensemble visualization research to improve network security analysis. To study this goal, we propose methods to interpret network security alerts and flow traffic as ensemble members. We can then apply ensemble visualization techniques in a network analysis environment to produce a network ensemble visualization system. Including ensemble representations provide new, in-depth insights into relationships between alerts and flow traffic. Analysts can cluster traffic with similar behavior and identify traffic with unusual patterns, something that is difficult to achieve with high-level overviews of large network datasets. Furthermore, our ensemble approach facilitates analysis of relationships between alerts and flow traffic, improves scalability, maintains accessibility and configurability, and is designed to fit our analysts' working environment, mental models, and problem solving strategies.","PeriodicalId":240847,"journal":{"name":"2015 IEEE Symposium on Visualization for Cyber Security (VizSec)","volume":"103 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-10-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122399997","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}