The Visualization for Cyber Security research community (VizSec) addresses longstanding challenges in cyber security by adapting and evaluating information visualization techniques with application to the cyber security domain. This research effort has created many tools and techniques that could be applied to improve cyber security, yet the community has not yet established unified standards for evaluating these approaches to predict their operational validity. In this paper, we survey and categorize the evaluation metrics, components, and techniques that have been utilized in the past decade of VizSec research literature. We also discuss existing methodological gaps in evaluating visualization in cyber security, and suggest potential avenues for future research in order to help establish an agenda for advancing the state-of-the-art in evaluating cyber security visualizations.

Hydro-thermal-wind generation scheduling (HTWGS) with economic and environmental factors is a multi-objective complex nonlinear power system optimization problem with many equality and inequality constraints. The objective of the problem is to generate an hour-by-hour optimum schedule of hydro-thermal-wind power plants to attain the least emission of pollutants from thermal plants and a reduced generation cost of thermal and wind plants for a 24-h period, satisfying the system constraints. The paper presents a detailed framework of the HTWGS problem and proposes a modified particle swarm optimization (MPSO) algorithm for evolving a solution. The competency of selected heuristic algorithms, representing different heuristic groups, viz. the binary coded genetic algorithm (BCGA), particle swarm optimization (PSO), improved harmony search (IHS), and JAYA algorithm, for searching for an optimal solution to HTWGS considering economic and environmental factors was investigated in a trial system consisting of a multi-stream cascaded system with four reservoirs, three thermal plants, and two wind plants. Appropriate mathematical models were used for representing the water discharge, generation cost, and pollutant emission of respective power plants incorporated in the system. Statistical analysis was performed to check the consistency and reliability of the proposed algorithm. The simulation results indicated that the proposed MPSO algorithm provided a better solution to the problem of HTWGS, with a reduced generation cost and the least emission, when compared with the other heuristic algorithms considered.

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Increased interconnectivity of Cyber-Physical Systems, by design or otherwise, increases the cyber attack surface and attack vectors. Observing the effects of these attacks is helpful in detecting them. In this paper, we show that many attacks on such systems result in a control loop effect we term Process Model Inconsistency (PMI). Our formal approach elucidates the relationships among incompleteness, incorrectness, safety, and inconsistency of process models. We show that incomplete process models lead to inconsistency. Surprisingly, inconsistency may arise even in complete and correct models. We illustrate our approach through an Automated Teller Machine (ATM) example, and describe the practical implications of the theoretical results. CCS CONCEPTS• Security and privacy → Formal security models; Embedded systems security.