A survey of security visualization for computer network logs

Network security is an important area in computer science. Although great efforts have already been made regarding security problems, networks are still threatened by all kinds of potential attacks, which may lead to huge damage and loss. Log files are main sources for security analysis. However, log files are not user friendly. It is laborious work to obtain useful information from log files. Compared with log files, visualization systems designed for security purposes provide more perceptive and effective sources for security analysis. Most security visualization systems are based on log files. In this paper, we provide a survey on visualization designs for computer network security. In this survey, we looked into different security visual analytics, and we organized them into five categories. Copyright (c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.