Visualization for Rapid Assessment and Projection in Cyber Situational Awareness

摘要

The goal of this research was to create a set of next generation cyber situational awareness capabilities with applications to other domains in the long term. The goal is to improve the decision making process such that decision makers can choose better actions. This exemplified our entire research process and was the reason for our extensive work on vulnerability and impact assessment. These techniques will allow analysts to make better decisions and better prioritizations than is currently being done. Thus, we put extensive effort into ensuring we had feedback from network analysts and managers and understood what their needs truly were. Vulnerability assessment provides a numerical score indicative of how likely an attack on a given system is to succeed. Impact assessment provides a numerical score indicative of how substantially an attack will impact a system. The goal in the long term is to determine early in the life cycle of an attack as to the nature of the attack such that its impact can be assessed and analysts can then accurately prioritize it. While we did extensive work on generating these numerical scores, our primary focus was on generating novel visualization designs to present this information succinctly to the analyst.