Visual Firewall Log Analysis -- At the Border Between Analytical and Appealing

TL;DR

This paper presents a human-centered, visually appealing firewall log analysis system designed to meet both strategic and operational security analysis needs, emphasizing user experience and flexibility.

Contribution

It introduces a novel design process incorporating hedonic qualities and develops a dual-part visual analysis prototype tailored for different security roles.

Findings

Successful prototype addressing high-level and low-level analysis needs

Positive user feedback on system usability and appeal

Enhanced understanding of user requirements through design study

Abstract

In this paper, we present our design study on developing an interactive visual firewall log analysis system in collaboration with an IT service provider. We describe the human-centered design process, in which we additionally considered hedonic qualities by including the usage of personas, psychological need cards and interaction vocabulary. For the problem characterization we especially focus on the demands of the two main clusters of requirements: high-level overview and low-level analysis, represented by the two defined personas, namely information security officer and network analyst. This resulted in the prototype of a visual analysis system consisting of two interlinked parts. One part addresses the needs for rather strategical tasks while also fulfilling the need for an appealing appearance and interaction. The other part rather addresses the requirements for operational tasks and aims to provide a high level of flexibility. We describe our design journey, the derived domain tasks and task abstractions as well as our visual design decisions, and present our final prototypes based on a usage scenario. We also report on our capstone event, where we conducted an observed experiment and collected feedback from the information security officer. Finally, as a reflection, we propose the extension of a widely used design study process with a track for an additional focus on hedonic qualities.