Paving Ontological Foundation for Social Engineering Analysis

Abstract

System security analysis has been focusing on technology-based attacks, while paying less attention on social perspectives. As a result, social engineering are becoming more and more serious threats to socio-technical systems, in which human plays important roles. However, due to the interdisciplinary nature of social engineering, there is a lack of consensus on its definition, hindering the further development of this research field. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive and fundamental ontology of social engineering, with the purpose of prompting the fast development of this field. In particular, we first review and compare existing social engineering taxonomies in order to summarize the core concepts and boundaries of social engineering, as well as identify corresponding research challenges. We then define a comprehensive social engineering ontology, which is embedded with extensive knowledge from psychology and sociology, providing a full picture of social engineering. The ontology is built on top of existing security ontologies in order to align social engineering analysis with typical security analysis as much as possible. By formalizing such ontology using Description Logic, we provide unambiguous definitions for core concepts of social engineering, serving as a fundamental terminology to facilitate research within this field. Finally, our ontology is evaluated based on a collection of existing social engineering attacks, the results of which indicate good expressiveness of our ontology.