Analysis of the Design Space for Cybersecurity Visualizations in VizSec

In this paper, we present research on the analysis of the design space for cybersecurity visualizations in VizSec. At the beginning of this research, we analyzed 17 survey papers in the field of cybersecurity visualization. Based on the analysis of the focus areas in each of these survey papers, we identified five key components of visualization design, i.e. Input Data, Security Tasks, Visual Encoding, Interactivity, and Evaluation. To show how research papers align with these components, we analyzed 60 papers published at the IEEE Symposium on Visualization for Cyber Security (VizSec) between 2016 and 2021 in the context of the five identified components. As a result, each research paper was classified into several categories derived from the selected components of the visualization design. Our contributions are: (i) an analysis of the focus areas in survey papers on cybersecurity visualization and (ii) the classification of 60 research papers in the context of the selected components of the visualization design. Finally, we highlighted the main findings of the analysis and drew conclusions.