Riverside: A design study on visualization for situation awareness in cybersecurity

Real-time situation awareness is a key challenge of cybersecurity defense. Visual analytics has been utilized for this purpose, but existing tools tend to require detailed knowledge about the network, which can be challenging in large-scale, production networks. We conducted an interview study involving 24 security professionals to gather requirements for the design, development, and evaluation of visualization to aid situation awareness in cybersecurity. Using these findings, we designed a visualization tool – called RIVERSIDE – for providing a real-time view of the dynamically changing computer network to support situation awareness. We evaluated Riverside in a user study involving 10 participants. Participants were placed in an incident response scenario that tasked them to identify malicious activity on a network. 20% of the users identified all attack component, while an additional 40% only missed one component.