ACH Walkthrough: A Distributed Multi-Device Tool for Collaborative Security Analysis.

ABSTRACTThis paper presents ACH Walkthrough, a prototype software client server application to demonstrate the potential benefits of surface technologies in collaborative security intelligence analysis. The basis is the ACH (Analysis of Competing Hypotheses) technique, which requests factors relating to evidence and hypotheses, and builds a model that reduces cognitive bias, thereby helping decision-making. Our application supports development of this model using visualization techniques that allow collaboration and reflection. The technology we use is surface computing, where analysts work around a large multi-touch display, but also multi-device technology, where the model is consistent across various large and small displays. The software runs in standard web-browsers, leveraging HTML5 and JavaScript libraries on both client and server. This allows deployment without installation, and thus security and flexibility.