Portola: A Hybrid Tree and Network Visualization Technique for Network Segmentation #7865

Kuhu Gupta, Aditeya Pandey, Larry Chan, Ambika Yadav, Brian Staats, Michelle Borkin

View presentation:2022-10-19T16:20:00ZGMT-0600Change your timezone on the schedule page
2022-10-19T16:20:00Z
Exemplar figure, described by caption below
Portola is a hybrid tree and network visualization that presents an overview of a segmented computer network and displays connections within the network. Using Portola, analysts can explore a segmented network, identify nodes and connections of interest through exploratory network analysis and drill down on elements of interest to reason about the patterns of relationships in the network. This work also discusses the design principles that broadly apply to design network security visualizations and lessons learned from the user-centered iterative design of Portola.

The live footage of the talk, including the Q&A, can be viewed on the session page, VizSec: Best Paper Announcement and Papers.

Keywords

Visualization—Cybersecurity—Analysis—Survey—VizSec

Abstract

In this paper, we present research on the analysis of the design space for cybersecurity visualizations in VizSec. At the beginning of this research, we analyzed 17 survey papers in the field of cybersecurity visualization. Based on the analysis of the focus areas in each of these survey papers, we identified five key components of visual- ization design, i.e. Input Data, Security Tasks, Visual Encoding, Interactivity, and Evaluation. To show how research papers align with these components, we analyzed 60 papers published at the IEEE Symposium on Visualization for Cyber Security (VizSec) be- tween 2016 and 2021 in the context of the five identified components. As a result, each research paper was classified into several categories derived from the selected components of the visualization design. Our contributions are: (i) an analysis of the focus areas in survey papers on cybersecurity visualization and (ii) the classification of 60 research papers in the context of the selected components of the visualization design. Finally, we highlighted the main findings of the analysis and drew conclusions.