State-of-the-Art in Software Security Visualization: A Systematic Review

Software security visualization is an interdisciplinary field that combines the technical complexity of cybersecurity, including threat intelligence and compliance monitoring, with visual analytics, transforming complex security data into easily digestible visual formats. As software systems get more complex and the threat landscape evolves, traditional text-based and numerical methods for analyzing and interpreting security concerns become increasingly ineffective. The purpose of this paper is to systematically review existing research and create a comprehensive taxonomy of software security visualization techniques through literature, categorizing these techniques into four types: graph-based, notation-based, matrix-based, and metaphor-based visualization. This systematic review explores over 60 recent key research papers in software security visualization, highlighting its key issues, recent advancements, and prospective future research directions. From the comprehensive analysis, the two main areas were distinctly highlighted as extensive software development visualization, focusing on advanced methods for depicting software architecture: operational security visualization and cybersecurity visualization. The findings highlight the necessity for innovative visualization techniques that adapt to the evolving security landscape, with practical implications for enhancing threat detection, improving security response strategies, and guiding future research.