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Idea: Visual Analytics for Web Security

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Engineering Secure Software and Systems (ESSoS 2018)

Abstract

The growing impact of issues in web security has led researchers to conduct large-scale measurements aimed at analyzing and understanding web-related ecosystems. Comprehensive solutions for data collection on a large set of websites have been developed, but analysis practices remain ad hoc, requiring additional efforts and slowing down investigations. A promising approach to data analysis is visual analytics, where interactive visualizations are used to speed up data exploration. However, this approach has not yet been applied to web security, and creating such a solution requires addressing domain-specific challenges.

In this paper, we show how visual analytics can help in analyzing the data from web security studies. We present a case study of leveraging an interactive visualization tool to replicate a security study, and evaluate a prototype tool implementing visual analytics techniques designed for web security. We conclude that such a tool would provide a solution that allows researchers to more effectively study web security issues.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://s3.amazonaws.com/alexa-static/top-1m.csv.zip.

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Acknowledgments

This research is partially funded by the Research Fund KU Leuven.

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Correspondence to Victor Le Pochat .

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Le Pochat, V., Van Goethem, T., Joosen, W. (2018). Idea: Visual Analytics for Web Security. In: Payer, M., Rashid, A., Such, J. (eds) Engineering Secure Software and Systems. ESSoS 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10953. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94496-8_10

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94496-8_10

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