ABSTRACT
The Visualization for Cyber Security research community (VizSec) addresses longstanding challenges in cyber security by adapting and evaluating information visualization techniques with application to the cyber security domain. This research effort has created many tools and techniques that could be applied to improve cyber security, yet the community has not yet established unified standards for evaluating these approaches to predict their operational validity. In this paper, we survey and categorize the evaluation metrics, components, and techniques that have been utilized in the past decade of VizSec research literature. We also discuss existing methodological gaps in evaluating visualization in cyber security, and suggest potential avenues for future research in order to help establish an agenda for advancing the state-of-the-art in evaluating cyber security visualizations.
1. INTRODUCTION
In cyber security, organizations rely on skilled analysts to make critical decisions regarding threats, vulnerabilities, and overall network health and performance. The fields of information visualization and visual analytics strive to leverage the unique perceptual capabilities of humans in concert with algorithmic support in order to better understand complex data. In recent years, visualization has emerged as a promising technique to better equip analysts to operate effectively in an evolving digital threat landscape.
7. CONCLUSION
In this work, we have outlined the “lay of the land” for visualization evaluation, as well as surveyed and categorized the evaluation metrics, components and techniques that have been utilized in the past decade of VizSec research literature. We have identified existing methodological gaps in evaluating visualization in cyber security, and suggested potential avenues for future research. It is our hope that this study will help establish an agenda for advancing the stateof-the-art in evaluating cyber security visualization, as well as encourage future dialogue on evaluation for operational utility.
