Home-centric visualization of network traffic for security administration

Abstract

Today's system administrators, burdened by rapidly increasing network activity, must quickly perceive the security state of their networks, but they often have only text-based tools to work with. These tools often provide no overview to help users grasp the big-picture. Our interviews with administrators have revealed that they need visualization tools; thus, we present VISUAL (Visual Information Security Utility for Administration Live), a network security visualization tool that allows users to see communication patterns between their home (or internal) networks and external hosts. VISUAL is part of our Network Eye security visualization architecture, also described in this paper.