Network security situation awareness (NSSA) is an integral part of cybersecurity defense, and it is essential for cybersecurity managers to respond to increasingly sophisticated cyber threats. Different from traditional security measures, NSSA can identify the behavior of various activities in the network and conduct intent understanding and impact assessment from a macro perspective so as to provide reasonable decision support, predicting the development trend of network security. It is a means to analyze the network security quantitatively. Although NSSA has received extensive attention and exploration, there is a lack of comprehensive reviews of the related technologies. This paper presents a state-of-the-art study on NSSA that can help bridge the current research status and future large-scale application. First, the paper provides a concise introduction to NSSA, highlighting its development process. Then, the paper focuses on the research progress of key technologies in recent years. We further discuss the classic use cases of NSSA. Finally, the survey details various challenges and potential research directions related to NSSA.
Keywords: NSSA visualization; artificial intelligence; situation assessment; situation awareness; situation prediction.