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7 Key Challenges for Visualization in Cyber Network Defense
In this paper we present seven challenges, informed by two user studies, to be considered when developing a visualization for cyber security purposes. Cyber security visualizations must go beyond isolated solutions and “pretty picture” visualizations in order to make impact to users. We provide an example prototype that addresses the challenges with a description of how they are met. Our aim is to assist in increasing utility and adoption rates for visualization capabilities in cyber security.
NV: Nessus Vulnerability Visualization for the Web
Network vulnerability is a critical component of network se- curity. Yet vulnerability analysis has received relatively lit- tle attention from the security visualization community. In this paper we describe nv, a web-based Nessus vulnerability visualization. Nv utilizes treemaps and linked histograms to allow system administrators to discover, analyze, and man- age vulnerabilities on their networks. In addition to visual- izing single Nessus scans, nv supports the analysis of sequen- tial scans by showing which vulnerabilities have been fixed, remain open, or are newly discovered. Nv was also designed to operate completely in-browser, to avoid sending sensitive data to outside servers. We discuss the design of nv, as well as provide case studies demonstrating vulnerability analysis workflows which include a multiple-node testbed and data from the 2011 VAST Challenge.
Electrochromic Window Demonstration at the Donna Land Port of Entry
The U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) Public Buildings Service (PBS) has jurisdiction, custody or control over 105 land ports of entry throughout the United States, 35 of which are located along the southern border. At these facilities, one of the critical functions of windows is to provide border control personnel with direct visual contact with the surrounding environment. This also can be done through surveillance cameras, but the high value that U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CPB) officers place on direct visual contact can be encapsulated in the following statement by a senior officer regarding this project: “nothing replaces line of sight.” In sunny conditions, however, outdoor visibility can be severely compromised by glare, especially when the orb of the sun is in the field of view. This often leads to the deployment of operable shading devices, such as Venetian blinds. While these devices address the glare, they obstruct the view of the surroundings, negating the visual security benefits of the windows.
Towards the Design of Grid Cyber-Physical Integrated Security Operations Center Visualizations
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A Review of Visualization Methods for Cyber-Physical Security: Smart Grid Case Study
Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) are becoming increasingly complex and interconnected as they attempt to meet the demands of evolving society. As a result, monitoring and maintaining them becomes a more complex and demanding task for control system operators and cyber defenders. While the literature on visualization techniques in the context of cybersecurity is extensive, the same cannot be said for studies on visualization for the security of cyber-physical systems. This paper aims to fill that gap by: 1) defining the main features of a visualizations workflow for security visualizations in cyber-physical systems. The workflow includes the acquisition of cyber and physical data, processing of data, selection, and configuration of both visualization tools and end-user interactions. 2) Providing an overview of cyber-physical security visualization systems, with a focus on smart grids as a case study. Finally, we use the perspectives gained from this analysis to provide insights and directions for future research and design of cyber-physical visualization techniques.
Data-Intensive Visual Analysis for Cyber Security
Protecting communications networks against attacks where the aim is to steal information, disrupt order, or harm critical infrastructure can require the collection and analysis of staggering amounts of data. The ability to detect and respond to threats quickly is a paramount concern across sectors, and especially for critical government, utility and financial networks. Yet detecting emerging or incipient threats in immense volumes of network traffic requires new computational and analytic approaches. Network security increasingly requires cooperation between human analysts able to spot suspicious events through means such as data visualization and automated systems that process streaming network data in near real-time to triage events so that human analysts are best able to focus their work.
Visual Cognition Visual Analytics and National Security Sensemaking: Interdisciplinary Research at Sandia National Laboratories.
Abstract not provided.
Applying Image Clutter Metrics to Domain-Specific Expert Visual Search
Visual clutter metrics play an important role in both the design of information visualizations and in the continued theoretical development of visual search models. In visualization design, clutter metrics provide a mathematical prediction of the complexity of the display and the difficulty associated with locating and identifying key pieces of information. In visual search models, they offer a proxy to set size, which represents the number of objects in the search scene, but is difficult to estimate in real-world imagery. In this article, we first briefly review the literature on clutter metrics and then contribute our own results drawn from studies in two security-oriented visual search domains: airport X-ray imagery and radar imagery. We analyze our results with an eye toward bridging the gap between the scene features evaluated by current clutter metrics and the features that are relevant to our security tasks. The article concludes with a brief discussion of possible research steps to close this gap.
Sonar
Sonar contains software for managing a HPC performance-monitoring software stack. This includes streaming data into a distributed Kafka message queue, storing/querying from a distributed Cassandra database, and front-end tools for secure access, visualization, and analytics of facility-wide performance data.
The First Human Trial of Transoral Robotic Surgery Using a Single-Port Robotic System in the Treatment of Laryngo-Pharyngeal Cancer
Background: This study aimed to evaluate the feasibility and safety of the DaVinci SP system for performing transoral robotic surgery (TORS) in patients with head and neck cancer. Methods: From October 2018 to April 2019, the medical records of 41 patients who underwent TORS using the DaVinci SP system were retrospectively reviewed. Results: During TORS, three robotic arms could be used to perform a geometric resection of the lesion in a narrow working space. The mean total operation time was 60 min, and the average time required to set up the robotic system was 10 min or less. All patients successfully underwent TORS. All robotic arms were inserted through a single port, which widened the working space around the patient’s head and allowed the operative assistant an easy approach to the patient during the operation. The joggle joint of the robotic arms aided easy manipulation within the confined working space. The joggle joints of the endoscopic arm were controlled through the navigation system, which was very helpful in securing superior visualization of the surgical site, especially in the area of the larynx and the hypopharynx. Conclusion: The study confirmed that the DaVinci SP system provided technical advantages above the Si and Xi systems for performing TORS. It was especially helpful in ensuring proper visualization of the surgical field and in performing precise surgery during surgery to the tongue base or the hypopharyngeal lesion.
Network Intrusion Detection and Visualization using Aggregations in a Cyber Security Data Warehouse
The challenge of achieving situational understanding is a limiting factor in effective, timely, and adaptive cyber-security analysis. Anomaly detection fills a critical role in network assessment and trend analysis, both of which underlie the establishment of comprehensive situational understanding. To that end, we propose a cyber security data warehouse implemented as a hierarchical graph of aggregations that captures anomalies at multiple scales. Each node of our pro-posed graph is a summarization table of cyber event aggregations, and the edges are aggregation operators. The cyber security data warehouse enables domain experts to quickly traverse a multi-scale aggregation space systematically. We describe the architecture of a test bed system and a summary of results on the IEEE VAST 2012 Cyber Forensics data.
Modeling and Visualizing Flow of Chemical Agents Across Complex Terrain
Release of chemical agents across complex terrain presents a real threat to homeland security. Modeling and visualization tools are being developed that capture flow fluid terrain interaction as well as point dispersal downstream flow paths. These analytic tools when coupled with UAV atmospheric observations provide predictive capabilities to allow for rapid emergency response as well as developing a comprehensive preemptive counter-threat evacuation plan. The visualization tools involve high-end computing and massive parallel processing combined with texture mapping. We demonstrate our approach across a mountainous portion of North California under two contrasting meteorological conditions. Animations depicting flow over this geographical location provide immediate assistance in decision support and crisis management.
Flexible visualization of a 3rd party Intrusion Prevention (Security) tool: A use case with the ELK stack
A difficult aspect of cyber security is the ability to achieve automated real time intrusion prevention across various sets of systems. To this extent, several companies are offering comprehensive solutions that leverage an "accuracy of scale" and moving much of the intelligence and detection on the Cloud, relying on an ever-growing set of data and analytics to increase decision accuracy. Often, they provide tools to visualize the decision workflows in attack prevention (as well as tune the algorithm) but those solutions are not always practical as companies see the problem as "global" that is, from a unified Cyber-security standpoint. However, a key to a successful Cyber-security program is transparency and trust: from an experimental team viewpoint, this specifically means having the ability to immediately see what and from where, who has been blocked and being able to inform the community in case of a revoked access without the need for filing a "ticket" (that may eventually be answered) – in other words, rapid response to their user-base is essential but solutions targeting "sub-groups" in an organization are not often available. We have come up with a versatile solution leveraging the ELK stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, & Kibana) and an IPS (Intrusion Prevention System) based WAF (Web Application Firewall) from Signal Sciences. Signal Science allows the streaming of detailed logs in a Logstash format suitable for custom solutions for visualization. By combining these two tools, we have strengthened our security posture and enabled individual experiments to monitor their own traffic. Specifically, the IPS WAF provides unique data such as country of origin, protocol, response code, source IP, and paths accessed. In this contribution, we will show how we engineered a visualization solution so experiment groups could access a dashboard with predefined graphs but also, where they can create individual customizable dashboards used to display blocked traffic and troubleshoot latency issues. We will discuss the details and procedures for developing and configuring these tools and how it benefits cyber security postures across our scientific based environment.
Spaceflight Operations Services Grid (SOSG)
In an effort to adapt existing space flight operations services to new emerging Grid technologies we are developing a Grid-based prototype space flight operations Grid. This prototype is based on the operational services being provided to the International Space Station's Payload operations located at the Marshall Space Flight Center, Alabama. The prototype services will be Grid or Web enabled and provided to four user communities through portal technology. Users will have the opportunity to assess the value and feasibility of Grid technologies to their specific areas or disciplines. In this presentation descriptions of the prototype development, User-based services, Grid-based services and status of the project will be presented. Expected benefits, findings and observations (if any) to date will also be discussed. The focus of the presentation will be on the project in general, status to date and future plans. The End-use services to be included in the prototype are voice, video, telemetry, commanding, collaboration tools and visualization among others. Security is addressed throughout the project and is being designed into the Grid technologies and standards development. The project is divided into three phases. Phase One establishes the baseline User-based services required for space flight operations listed above. Phase Two involves applying Gridlweb technologies to the User-based services and development of portals for access by users. Phase Three will allow NASA and end users to evaluate the services and determine the future of the technology as applied to space flight operational services. Although, Phase One, which includes the development of the quasi-operational User-based services of the prototype, development will be completed by March 2004, the application of Grid technologies to these services will have just begun. We will provide status of the Grid technologies to the individual User-based services. This effort will result in an extensible environment that incorporates existing and new spaceflight services into a standards-based framework providing current and future NASA programs with cost savings and new and evolvable methods to conduct science. This project will demonstrate how the use of new programming paradigms such as web and grid services can provide three significant benefits to the cost-effective delivery of spaceflight services. They will enable applications to operate more efficiently by being able to utilize pooled resources. They will also permit the reuse of common services to rapidly construct new and more powerful applications. Finally they will permit easy and secure access to services via a combination of grid and portal technology by a distributed user community consisting of NASA operations centers, scientists, the educational community and even the general population as outreach. The approach will be to deploy existing mission support applications such as the Telescience Resource Kit (TReK) and new applications under development, such as the Grid Video Distribution System (GViDS), together with existing grid applications and services such as high-performance computing and visualization services provided by NASA s Information Power Grid (IPG) in the MSFC s Payload Operations Integration Center (POIC) HOSC Annex. Once the initial applications have been moved to the grid, a process will begin to apply the new programming paradigms to integrate them where possible. For example, with GViDS, instead of viewing the Distribution service as an application that must run on a single node, the new approach is to build it such that it can be dispatched across a pool of resources in response to dynamic loads. To make this a reality, reusable services will be critical, such as a brokering service to locate appropriate resource within the pool. This brokering service can then be used by other applications such as the TReK. To expand further, if the GViDS application is constructed using a services-based mel, then other applications such as the Video Auditorium can then use GViDS as a service to easily incorporate these video streams into a collaborative conference. Finally, as these applications are re-factored into this new services-based paradigm, the construction of portals to integrate them will be a simple process. As a result, portals can be tailored to meet the requirements of specific user communities.
Radiative lifetime-encoded unicolour security tags using perovskite nanocrystals
Traditional fluorescence-based tags, used for anticounterfeiting, rely on primitive pattern matching and visual identification; additional covert security features such as fluorescent lifetime or pattern masking are advantageous if fraud is to be deterred. Herein, we present an electrohydrodynamically printed unicolour multi-fluorescent-lifetime security tag system composed of lifetime-tunable lead-halide perovskite nanocrystals that can be deciphered with both existing time-correlated single-photon counting fluorescence-lifetime imaging microscopy and a novel time-of-flight prototype. We find that unicolour or matching emission wavelength materials can be prepared through cation-engineering with the partial substitution of formamidinium for ethylenediammonium to generate “hollow” formamidinium lead bromide perovskite nanocrystals; these materials can be successfully printed into fluorescence-lifetime-encoded-quick-read tags that are protected from conventional readers. Furthermore, we also demonstrate that a portable, cost-effective time-of-flight fluorescence-lifetime imaging prototype can also decipher these codes. A single comprehensive approach combining these innovations may be eventually deployed to protect both producers and consumers.
National Center for Nuclear Security: The Nuclear Forensics Project (F2012)
These presentation visuals introduce the National Center for Nuclear Security. Its chartered mission is to enhance the Nation’s verification and detection capabilities in support of nuclear arms control and nonproliferation through R&D activities at the NNSS. It has three focus areas: Treaty Verification Technologies, Nonproliferation Technologies, and Technical Nuclear Forensics. The objectives of nuclear forensics are to reduce uncertainty in the nuclear forensics process & improve the scientific defensibility of nuclear forensics conclusions when applied to nearsurface nuclear detonations. Research is in four key areas: Nuclear Physics, Debris collection and analysis, Prompt diagnostics, and Radiochemistry.
Novel data visualizations of x-ray data for aviation security applications using the OTAP platform.
Abstract not provided.