At the beginning of this week, I spent some time with a number of interesting folks talking about cyber security visualization. It was a diverse set of people from the DoD, the X Prize foundation, game designers, and even an astronaut. We all discussed what it would mean if we launched a grand challenge to improve cyber situational awareness. Something like the Lunar XPrize that is a challenge where teams have to build a robot and successfully send it to the moon.

There were a number of interesting proposals that came to the table. On a lot of them I had to bring things back down to reality every now and then. These people are not domain experts in cyber security, so you might imagine what kind of ideas they suggested. But it was fun to be challenged and to hear all these crazy ideas. Definitely expanded my horizon and stretched my imagination.

What I found interesting is that pretty much everybody gravitated towards a game-like challenge. All the way to having a game simulator for cyber security situational awareness.

Anyways, we’ll see whether the DoD is actually going to carry through with this. I sure hope so, it would help the secviz field enormously and spur interesting development, as well as extend and revitalize the secviz community!

Here is the presentation about situational awareness that I gave on the first day. I talked very briefly about what situational awareness is, where we are today, what the challenges are, and where we should be moving to.