English

Critical Path Prioritization Dashboard for Alert-driven Attack Graphs

Cryptography and Security 2023-10-23 v1

Abstract

Although intrusion alerts can provide threat intelligence regarding attacker strategies, extracting such intelligence via existing tools is expensive and time-consuming. Earlier work has proposed SAGE, which generates attack graphs from intrusion alerts using unsupervised sequential machine learning. This paper proposes a querying and prioritization-enabled visual analytics dashboard for SAGE. The dashboard has three main components: (i) a Graph Explorer that presents a global view of all attacker strategies, (ii) a Timeline Viewer that correlates attacker actions chronologically, and (iii) a Recommender Matrix that highlights prevalent critical alerts via a MITRE ATT&CK-inspired attack stage matrix. We describe the utility of the proposed dashboard using intrusion alerts collected from a distributed multi-stage team-based attack scenario. We evaluate the utility of the dashboard through a user study. Based on the responses of a small set of security practitioners, we find that the dashboard is useful in depicting attacker strategies and attack progression, but can be improved in terms of usability.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2310.13079,
  title  = {Critical Path Prioritization Dashboard for Alert-driven Attack Graphs},
  author = {Sònia Leal Díaz and Sergio Pastrana and Azqa Nadeem},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2310.13079},
  year   = {2023}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T12:56:07.109Z