Merry Christmas, firts of all ...
I was reading a presentation on using 3D game engines to visualize security data. The idea is to use the game engines from, for example Doom, to visualize security data in a 3D space, called Real-Time Collaborative Network Monitoring and Control Using 3D Game Engines for Representation and Interaction.
While I think the idea is really interesting, I am not sure that the approach really solves a problem. 3D game engines are really good for capturing immediate input from players. Games require very quick reactions to objects showing up in a scene. Security data does not normally have this property. It is much more important to make sure that the data is correct and that the context of the event is interpreted the right way.
It would be interesting to hear more from the authors about how they map the security data into the 3D space. It is incredibly important for administrators and security analysts to understand the big picture and have context of events visualized. The presentation does unfortunately not explain how the events are mapped into the space. However, I think that is the most important task. You don't want to distract the user with too many objects in the space while still representing all the context so the analyst can make an informed decision. I would love to see more motivation why a 3D representation is better suited for representing security events than a more traditional 2D approach
Trying to draw some parallels between games and computer security myself, I was thinking about the progress of an attack. It would be interesting if the attackers could be visualized as the enemies. Then you would visualize the network topology as the "world", the "buildings". Continuing from there you would show how far the attackers progressed into breaking in. The problem with this approach is that you need to be able to assign individual security events to an "attack" (i.g., event fusion).
To summarize, I think the emphasize should be put on how to map the security events into the 3D world and not so much on the interaction.