Abstract
Situation awareness is often described as the perception and comprehension of the current situation, and the projection of future status. Whilst this may be well understood in an organisational cybersecurity context, there is a strong case to be made for effective cybersecurity situation awareness that is tailored to the needs of the Non-Expert User (NEU). Our online usage habits are rapidly evolving with smartphones and tablets being widely used to access resources online. In order for NEUs to remain safe online, there is a need to enhance awareness and understanding of cybersecurity concerns, such as how devices may be acting online, and what data is being shared between devices. In this paper, we extend our proposal of the Enhanced Personal Situation Awareness (ePSA) framework to consider the key details of cyber situation awareness that would be of concern to NEUs, and we consider how such information can be effectively conveyed using a visual analytic approach. We present the design of our visual analytics approach to show how this can represent the key details of cyber situation awareness whilst maintaining a simple and clean design scheme so as to not result in information-overload for the user. The guidance developed through the course of this work can help practitioners develop tools that could help NEUs better understand their online actions, with the aim of giving users greater control and safer experiences when their personal devices are acting online.
Highlights
There is no doubt that the modern Internet has revolutionised how society interact today
We extend the Enhanced Personal Situation Awareness (ePSA) framework (Legg, 2016) to consider the key factors of interest for conveying cyber situation awareness to Non-Expert User (NEU), and we further develop the visual analytics design to better accommodate this additional information;
We propose a framework that is designed to support NEUs to engage with network traffic analysis in order to better support their understanding and perception of cyber security concerns
Summary
There is no doubt that the modern Internet has revolutionised how society interact today. With the increase of threats online, and the lack of awareness that many of those acting in cyber space have, there is a serious need to think about how we as researchers can help to alleviate this situation One step towards this is to consider how users can observe, monitor, and understand their own personal cybersecurity. We positioned the concept of NEUs within security visualization and security visual analytics, and argued why there is a strong case for improving understanding of security concerns for all users of cyber space Whilst tools such as Wireshark (Figure 1) offer excellent deep analysis for security experts, they do not reveal much about the network landscape for more typical users.
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