From a to z: Developing a visual vocabulary for information security threat visualisation

Abstract

Security visualisation is a very difficult problem due to its inherent need to represent complexity and to be flexible for a wide range of applications. As a result, many current approaches are not particularly effective. This paper presents several novel approaches for visualising information security threats which aim to create a flexible and effective basis for creating semantically rich threat visualisation diagrams. By presenting generalised approaches, these ideas can be applied to a wide variety of situations, as demonstrated in two specific visualisations: one for visualising attack trees, the other for visualising attack graphs. It concludes by discussing future work and introducing a novel exploration of attack models.