Security-by-ontology: A knowledge-centric approach

Abstract

We present a security ontology (SO), which can be used as a basis of security management of an arbitrary information system. This SO provides capabilities, such as modeling of risk assessment knowledge, abstraction of security requirements, reusable security knowledge interoperability, aggregation and reasoning. The SO is based on the exploitation of security-related knowledge, derived from diverse sources. We demonstrate that the establishment of such a framework is feasible and, furthermore, that a SO can support critical security activities of an expert, e.g. security requirements identification, as well as selection of certain countermeasures. We also present and discuss an implementation of a specific SO. The implementation is accompanied by results regarding how a SO can be built and populated with security information. © 2006 International Federation for Information Processing.