MVSec: multi-perspective and deductive visual analytics on heterogeneous network security data

In this article, we present a visual analytics system, MVSec, which helps analysts understand better what information flows under network security datasets. The major contributions of this work include: (1) a data fusion strategy for multiple heterogeneous datasets by using unified event tuple and statistic tuple data structure, which compress large scale datasets and lays the foundation of cooperative visual analysis; (2) multiple coordinated views, which provide analysts with multiple visual perspectives to characterize loud events, dig out subtle events and investigate relations of events in datasets; and (3) a contextual visual analysis with deductive viewpoints, which inspires analysts to explore hypotheses and reason their deductions from visual narratives. In case studies, we demonstrate in detail how the system helps analysts draw an analytical storyline and understand network situations better in VAST Challenge 2013. Additionally, we discuss lessons learned in designing our system and participating in VAST Challenge 2013, which is helpful and applicable not only to similar network security systems but also to other domains facing visual analytics challenges.