Proceedings of the Ninth International Symposium on Visualization for Cyber Security

Welcome to VizSec 2012! VizSec is the International Symposium on Visualization for Cyber Security and is a forum that brings together researchers and practitioners from academia, government, and industry to address the needs of the cyber security community through new and insightful visualization techniques. This year, we are pleased to be a part of VisWeek, the premier forum for advances in scientific and information visualization. There is a wonderful synergy with being held along with VisWeek; it is the cutting edge tools and ideas presented at VisWeek that become the fuel for inspiration for visualizing critical cyber security issues. Increasingly, cyber security plays a critical role in the health and well-being of nations around the world. Cyber-warfare, cyber-crime, and cyber-terrorism threaten the economic and political stability of modernized society. Massive botnets and automated attacks disrupt services, threaten national infrastructures, and fuels international crime. Visualization serves as a powerful tool to monitor, detect, and analyze security-related incidents. Whether providing a real-time view of network traffic and potential threats, or analyzing digital forensic data for attribution, visualization techniques can provide insights and understandings that are not gleaned from using traditional approaches. It is the combination of researching new visual approaches and evaluating the practical application of those techniques to real-world problems that is the heart of VizSec. This year we received 21 technical paper submissions. Each paper was refereed by three members of the program committee, which selected twelve papers for inclusion in the program and proceedings. This year's papers once again reflect the diversity of the field. Low level topics such as analyzing distributed memory computations and firewall configurations are mixed with higher level issues such as designing visualizations to provide situational awareness capability. Our keynote speaker, Raphael Marty, is a well-known advocate and practitioner of security visualization who has for many years hosted an informative forum for sharing ideas and experiences in the practical aspects of employing visualization principles to cyber security.