The future of security visualization: Lessons from network visualization

Approaches in security visualization have made significant progress in addressing challenges in the ever changing landscape of network security. However, many approaches are limited in both scope and scale, especially when we consider the complexity of the complete security analysis process. In this article, we review several notable recent systems in security visualization, examining their relative strengths and limitations. We then show that recent research in general network visualization, which often deals with domains other than security, provides new visual metaphors and interaction techniques that will help address limitations in security visualization systems. We examine several of these network visualization approaches in detail, and discuss how they can be applied to meet the challenges of the next generation of security visualization systems.