Looking for a Black Cat in a Dark Room: Security Visualization for Cyber-Physical System Design and Analysis

Abstract

Today, there is a plethora of software security tools employing visualizations that enable the creation of useful and effective interactive security analyst dashboards. Such dashboards can assist the analyst to understand the data at hand and, consequently, to conceive more targeted preemption and mitigation security strategies. Despite the recent advances, model-based security analysis is lacking tools that employ effective dashboards—to manage potential attack vectors, system components, and requirements. This problem is further exacerbated because model-based security analysis produces significantly larger result spaces than security analysis applied to realized systems—where platform specific information, software versions, and system element dependencies are known. Therefore, there is a need to manage the analysis complexity in model-based security through better visualization techniques. Towards that goal, we propose an interactive security analysis dashboard that provides different views largely centered around the system, its requirements, and its associated attack vector space. This tool makes it possible to start analysis earlier in the system lifecycle. We apply this tool in a significant area of engineering design—the design of cyber-physical systems—where security violations can lead to safety hazards.