Designing a Vulnerability Management Dashboard to Enhance Security Analysts’ Decision Making Processes

BSTRACT Network vulnerability management reduces threats posed by weaknesses in software, hardware, or organizational practices. As networks and related threats grow in size and complexity, security analysts face the challenges of analyzing large amounts of data and prioritizing and communicating threats quickly and efficiently. In this paper, we report our work-in-progress of developing a vulnerability management dashboard that helps analysts overcome these challenges. The approach uses interviews to identify a typical security analyst workflow and proceeds with an iterative design that relies on real-world data. The vulnerability dashboard development was based on a common security analyst workflow and includes functions to allow vulnerability prioritization according to their age, persistence, and impact on the system. Future work will look to execute full-scale user studies to evaluate the dashboard’s functionality and decision-making utility.