TAMASSIA R.: Effective visualization of file system accesscontrol. In Visualization for Computer Security

Abstract. In this paper, we present a visual representation of access control permissions in a standard hierarchical file system. Our visual-ization of file permissions leverages treemaps, a popular graphical rep-resentation of hierarchical data. In particular, we present a visualization of access control for the NTFS file system that can help a non-expert user understand and manipulate file system permissions in a simple and effective way. While our examples are based on NTFS, our approach can be used for many other hierarchical file systems as well.