Improved information security situational awareness by manifold visualisation

Abstract

Security situational awareness is an essential building block in order to estimate security level of systems and to decide how to protect networked systems from cyber attacks. In this extended abstract we envision a model that combines results from security metrics to 3d network visualisation. The purpose is to apply security metrics to gather data from individual hosts. Simultaneously, the whole network is visualised in a 3d format, including network hosts and their connections. The proposed model makes it possible to offer enriched situational awareness for security administrators. This can be achieved by adding information pertaining to individual host into the network level 3d visualisation. Thus, administrator can see connected hosts and how the security of these hosts differs at one glance.