Motivation

A picture is worth a thousand words, indeed. The human visual analysis system is capabale of extracting and processing large amounts of information very efficiently. It is no surprise therefore that visual communication is the most effective means of communicating ideas. Even very complex ideas - such as security.

Computer security is a very important and difficult concept to understand and appreciate. This is especially true of most internet users who have an extremely naive security model and are generally unaware of the threats their systems are exposed to. Providing stable, ubiquitous security to all users has hence emerged as one of the biggest challenges of recent times.

Approach

One approach to increasing security is user education. If users can be made aware of their network surroundings in ways that are unobtrusive to their primary goals, they can better understand the security needs and take the necessary actions to that end. Most contemporary security tools either completely ignore user education or take a very intrusive approach to it, thus singularly failing to provide robust security.

Our prototype, FireViz, leverages the human perceptual capabilities by employing various visual techniques to depict all network activity in real time. Over time, FireViz creates typical network usage profiles - based on traffic and the users' firewall logs - which can easily reflect anomalous network behavior. Such anomalies can be detected by all users who can take the appropriate security measures (such as updating their firewall rules). The most important feature of FireViz is its peripheral interface that comes very far in its attempt of educating users without obstructing their work. Thus, by targeting users' strongest capabilities (visual) and their primary goals, FireViz provides a novel approach to understanding and improving end user computer security.

References:

[1] Nidhi Sharma. "FireViz: A Personal Network Firewall Visualizing Tool." MEng thesis proposal, December 2004.