Rosa Romero-Gomez won the Best Paper Award at the IEEE Symposium on Visualization for Cyber Security (VizSec 2017). The symposium took place on October 2 in Phoenix, Arizona and was held in association with the IEEE InfoVis Conference.

Romero-Gomez is a postdoctoral researcher in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE). Her award-winning paper, entitled “Towards Designing Effective Visualizations for DNS-based Network Threat Analysis,” was coauthored by Yacin Nadji, a fellow ECE postdoctoral researcher, and ECE Assistant Professor Manos Antonakakis, who leads the Astrolavos Lab and advises both Romero-Gomez and Nadji. 

Romero-Gomez designed and developed an open source threat console to help information security analysts and security researchers visualize DNS-based threat intelligence in order to better identify network threats. The console that she developed supports both proactive and reactive network threat analysis so that security analysts can better determine the volume of risks associated with an IP address, a geographical location, or an “autonomous system”/network (such as a domain name registrar, cloud service, or corporation).

The console was evaluated by employed information security researchers: seven who provided in situ feedback and 31 who completed test demonstrations and surveys. This work is part of the Active DNS Project, which is funded by a $17-million award from the U.S. Department of Defense. The project’s website shows examples of how Romero-Gomez’s visualizations give contextual information about cyberthreats.