Biblio

Due to the rapid development of cyber-physical systems, there are more and more security problems. The purpose of this work is to develop the concept of a knowledge base in the field of security of cyber-physical systems based on an ontological approach. To create the concept of a knowledge base, it was necessary to consider the system of a cyber-physical system and highlight its structural parts. As a result, the main concepts of the security of a cyber-physical system were identified and the concept of a knowledge base was drawn up, which in the future will help to analyze potential threats to cyber-physical systems.

Security evaluation can be performed using a variety of analysis methods, such as attack trees, attack graphs, threat propagation models, stochastic Petri nets, and so on. These methods analyze the effect of attacks on the system, and estimate security attributes from different perspectives. However, they require information from experts in the application domain for properly capturing the key elements of an attack scenario: i) the attack paths a system could be subject to, and ii) the different characteristics of the possible adversaries. For this reason, some recent works focused on the generation of low-level security models from a high-level description of the system, hiding the technical details from the modeler.In this paper we build on an existing ontology framework for security analysis, available in the ADVISE Meta tool, and we extend it in two directions: i) to cover the attack patterns available in the CAPEC database, a comprehensive dictionary of known patterns of attack, and ii) to capture all the adversaries’ profiles as defined in the Threat Agent Library (TAL), a reference library for defining the characteristics of external and internal threat agents ranging from industrial spies to untrained employees. The proposed extension supports a richer combination of adversaries’ profiles and attack paths, and provides guidance on how to further enrich the ontology based on taxonomies of attacks and adversaries.

Cybersecurity attacks, which have many business impacts, continuously become more intelligent and complex. These attacks take the form of a combination of various attack elements. APT attacks reflect this characteristic well. To defend against APT attacks, organizations should sufficiently understand these attacks based on the attack elements and their relations and actively defend against these attacks in multiple dimensions. Most organizations perform risk management to manage their information security. Generally, they use the information system risk assessment (ISRA). However, the method has difficulties supporting sufficiently analyzing security risks and actively responding to these attacks due to the limitations of asset-driven qualitative evaluation activities. In this paper, we propose a threat-driven risk assessment method. This method can evaluate how dangerous APT attacks are for an organization, analyze security risks from multiple perspectives, and support establishing an adaptive security strategy.

Firewalls are security devices that perform network traffic filtering. They are ubiquitous in the industry and are a common method used to enforce organizational security policy. Security policy is specified on a high level of abstraction, with statements such as "web browsing is allowed only on workstations inside the office network", and needs to be translated into low-level firewall rules to be enforceable. There has been a lot of work regarding optimization, analysis and platform independence of firewall rules, but an area that has seen much less success is automatic translation of high-level security policies into firewall rules. In addition to improving rules’ readability, such translation would make it easier to detect errors.This paper surveys of over twenty papers that aim to generate firewall rules according to a security policy specified on a higher level of abstraction. It also presents an overview of similar features in modern firewall systems. Most approaches define specialized domain languages that get compiled into firewall rule sets, with some of them relying on formal specification, ontology, or graphical models. The approaches’ have improved over time, but there are still many drawbacks that need to be solved before wider application.

{With the rapid development of cyberspace, cyber security incidents are increasing, and the means and types of network attacks are becoming more and more complex and refined, which brings greater challenges to security risk control. First, the knowledge graph technology is used to construct a cyber security knowledge graph based on ontology to realize multi-source heterogeneous security big data fusion calculation, and accurately express the complex correlation between different security entities. Furthermore, for cyber security risk control, a key node assessment method for security risk diffusion is proposed. From the perspectives of node communication correlation and topological level, the calculation method of node communication importance based on improved PageRank Algorithm and based on the improved K-shell Algorithm calculates the importance of node topology are studied, and then organically combine the two calculation methods to calculate the importance of different nodes in security risk defense. Experiments show that this method can evaluate the importance of nodes more accurately than the PageRank algorithm and the K-shell algorithm.

In this paper, we present the Cloud Property Graph (CloudPG), which bridges the gap between static code analysis and runtime security assessment of cloud services. The CloudPG is able to resolve data flows between cloud applications deployed on different resources, and contextualizes the graph with runtime information, such as encryption settings. To provide a vendorand technology-independent representation of a cloud service's security posture, the graph is based on an ontology of cloud resources, their functionalities and security features. We show, using an example, that our CloudPG framework can be used by security experts to identify weaknesses in their cloud deployments, spanning multiple vendors or technologies, such as AWS, Azure and Kubernetes. This includes misconfigurations, such as publicly accessible storages or undesired data flows within a cloud service, as restricted by regulations such as GDPR.

In this paper, we propose a novel protocol to represent the human factor on a blockchain environment. Our approach allows single or groups of humans to propose data in blocks which cannot be validated automatically but need human knowledge and collaboration to be validated. Only if human-based consensus on the correctness and trustworthiness of the data is reached, the new block is appended to the blockchain. This human approach significantly extends the possibilities of blockchain applications on data types apart from financial transaction data.

Cyberattacks on cyber supply chain (CSC) systems and the cascading impacts have brought many challenges and different threat levels with unpredictable consequences. The embedded networks nodes have various loopholes that could be exploited by the threat actors leading to various attacks, risks, and the threat of cascading attacks on the various systems. Key factors such as lack of common ontology vocabulary and semantic interoperability of cyberattack information, inadequate conceptualized ontology learning and hierarchical approach to representing the relationships in the CSC security domain has led to explicit knowledge representation. This paper explores cyberattack ontology learning to describe security concepts, properties and the relationships required to model security goal. Cyberattack ontology provides a semantic mapping between different organizational and vendor security goals has been inherently challenging. The contributions of this paper are threefold. First, we consider CSC security modelling such as goal, actor, attack, TTP, and requirements using semantic rules for logical representation. Secondly, we model a cyberattack ontology for semantic mapping and knowledge representation. Finally, we discuss concepts for threat intelligence and knowledge reuse. The results show that the cyberattack ontology concepts could be used to improve CSC security.

Nowadays, video surveillance systems are part of our daily life, because of their role in ensuring the security of goods and people this generates a huge amount of video data. Thus, several research works based on the ontology paradigm have tried to develop an efficient system to index and search precisely a very large volume of videos. Due to their semantic expressiveness, ontologies are undoubtedly very much in demand in recent years in the field of video surveillance to overcome the problem of the semantic gap between the interpretation of the data extracted from the low level and the high-level semantics of the video. Despite its good expressiveness of semantics, a classical ontology may not be sufficient for good handling of uncertainty, which is however commonly present in the video surveillance domain, hence the need to consider a new ontological approach that will better represent uncertainty. Fuzzy logic is recognized as a powerful tool for dealing with vague, incomplete, imperfect, or uncertain data or information. In this work, we develop a new ontological approach based on fuzzy logic. All the relevant fuzzy concepts such as Video\_Objects, Video\_Events, Video\_Sequences, that could appear in a video surveillance domain are well represented with their fuzzy Ontology DataProperty and the fuzzy relations between them (Ontology ObjectProperty). To achieve this goal, the new fuzzy video surveillance ontology is implemented using the fuzzy ontology web language 2 (fuzzy owl2) which is an extension of the standard semantic web language, ontology web language 2 (owl2).

Based on the success of terrestrial Internet of Things (IoT), research has started on Underwater IoT (UIoT). The UIoT describes global network of connected underwater things that interact with water environment and communicate with terrestrial network through the underwater communication technologies. For UIoT device, it is important to choose the channel before transmission. This paper deals with UIoT communication technologies and ontology based path selection mechanism for UIoT.

Smart home assistants are becoming a norm due to their ease-of-use. They employ spoken language as an interface, facilitating easy interaction with their users. Even with their obvious advantages, natural-language based interfaces are not prevalent outside the domain of home assistants. It is hard to adopt them for computer-controlled systems due to the numerous complexities involved with their implementation in varying fields. The main challenge is the grounding of natural language base terms into the underlying system's primitives. The existing systems that do use natural language interfaces are specific to one problem domain only.In this paper, a domain-agnostic framework that creates natural language interfaces for computer-controlled systems has been developed by creating a customizable mapping between the language constructs and the system primitives. The framework employs ontologies built using OWL (Web Ontology Language) for knowledge representation and machine learning models for language processing tasks.

Modern Intelligent Transport Systems (ITSs) are comprehensive applications that have to cope with a multitude of challenges while meeting strict service and security standards. A novel data-centric middleware that provides the foundation of such systems is presented in this paper. This middleware is designed for high scalability, fast data processing and multimodality. To achieve these goals, an innovative spatial annotation (SpatiaIJSON) is utilised. SpatialJSON allows the representation of geometry, topology and traffic information in one dataset. Data processing is designed in such a manner that any schema or ontology can be used to express information. Further, common concerns of ITSs are addressed, such as authenticity of messages. The core task, however, is to ensure a quick exchange of evaluated information between the individual traffic participants.

Medical organizations find it challenging to adopt cloud-based Electronic Health Records (EHR) services due to the risk of data breaches and the resulting compromise of patient data. Existing authorization models follow a patient-centric approach for EHR management, where the responsibility of authorizing data access is handled at the patients’ end. This creates significant overhead for the patient, who must authorize every access of their health record. It is also not practical given that multiple personnel are typically involved in providing care and that the patient may not always be in a state to provide this authorization.

Aiming at the disadvantages of traditional methods such as low penetration path generation efficiency and low attack type recognition accuracy, an optimal penetration path generation algorithm based on the knowledge map power WEB system unknown attack is proposed. First, establish a minimum penetration path test model. And use the model to test the unknown attack of the penetration path under the power WEB system. Then, the ontology of the knowledge graph is designed. Finally, the design of the optimal penetration path generation algorithm based on the knowledge graph is completed. Experimental results show that the algorithm improves the efficiency of optimal penetration path generation, overcomes the shortcomings of traditional methods that can only describe known attacks, and can effectively guarantee the security of power WEB systems.

The ability to specify various policies with different overriding criteria allows for complex sets of sharing policies. This is particularly useful in situations in which data privacy depends on various properties of the data, and complex policies are needed to express the conditions under which data is protected. However, if overriding policy decisions constrain the affected data, decisions from overridden policies should not be suppressed completely, because they can still apply to subsets of the affected data. This article describes how a privacy policy framework can be extended with a mechanism to partially override decisions based on specified constraints. Our solution automatically generates complementary sets of decisions for both the overridden and the complementary, non-overridden subsets of the data, and thus, provides a means to specify a complex policies tailored to specific properties of the protected data.

In recent years, there are more and more attacks and exploitation aiming at network security vulnerabilities. It is effective for us to prevent criminals from exploiting vulnerabilities for attacks and help security analysts maintain equipment security that knows vulnerabilities and threats on time. With the knowledge graph, we can organize, manage, and utilize the massive information effectively in cyberspace. In this paper we construct the vulnerability ontology after analyzing multi-source heterogeneous databases. And the vulnerability knowledge graph is established. Experimental results show that the accuracy of entity recognition for extracting vendor names reaches 89.76%. The more rules used in entity recognition, the higher the accuracy and the lower the error rate.

This paper puts forward a formalized method of emergency plan based on ontology, sums up the main concepts such as system, event, rule, measure, constraint and resource, and analyzes the logical relationship among concepts. A digital intelligent emergency plan storage scheme based on relational database model is proposed. In this paper, full-text search, data search and knowledge search are comprehensively used to adapt to the information needs and characteristics of different users' query plans. Finally, an example of emergency plan made by a power supply company is given to illustrate the effectiveness of the method.

With the increasing attention to ocean and the development of data-intensive sciences, a large amount of ocean data has been acquired by various observing platforms and sensors, which poses new challenges to data management and utilization. Typically, nowadays we target to move ocean data management toward the FAIR principles of being findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable. However, the data produced and managed by different organizations with wide diversity, various structures and increasing volume make it hard to be FAIR, and one of the most critical reason is the lack of unified data representation and publication methods. In this paper, we propose novel techniques to try to solve the problem by introducing semantics with ontologies. Specifically, we first propose a unified semantic model named OEDO to represent ocean data by defining the concepts of ocean observing field, specifying the relations between the concepts, and describing the properties with ocean metadata. Then, we further optimize the state-of-the-art quick service query list (QSQL) data structure, by extending the domain concepts with WordNet to improve data discovery. Moreover, based on the OEDO model and the optimized QSQL, we propose an ocean data service publishing method called DOLP to improve data discovery and data access. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposals.

The lack of standardization of the terms insider and insider threat has been a noted problem for researchers in the insider threat field. This paper describes the investigation of 42 different definitions of the terms insider and insider threat, with the goal of better understanding the current conceptual model of insider threat and facilitating communication in the research community.

The number of organizations adopting the Data Warehouse (DW) technology along with data analytics in order to improve the effectiveness of their decision-making processes is permanently increasing. Despite the efforts invested, the DW design remains a great challenge research domain. More accurately, the design quality of the DW depends on several aspects; among them, the requirement-gathering phase is a critical and complex task. In this context, we propose a Natural language (NL) NL-template based design approach, which is twofold; firstly, it facilitates the involvement of decision-makers in the early step of the DW design; indeed, using NL is a good and natural means to encourage the decision-makers to express their requirements as query-like English sentences. Secondly, our approach aims to generate a DW multidimensional schema from a set of gathered requirements (as OLAP: On-Line-Analytical-Processing queries, written according to the NL suggested templates). This approach articulates around: (i) two NL-templates for specifying multidimensional components, and (ii) a set of five heuristic rules for extracting the multidimensional concepts from requirements. Really, we are developing a software prototype that accepts the decision-makers' requirements then automatically identifies the multidimensional components of the DW model.

This paper proposes a novel extension of blockchain systems with fuzzy ontologies. The main advantage is to let the users have flexible restrictions, represented using fuzzy sets, and to develop smart contracts where there is a partial agreement among the involved parts. We propose a general architecture based on four fuzzy ontologies and a process to develop and run the smart contracts, based on a reduction to a well-known fuzzy ontology reasoning task (Best Satisfiability Degree). We also investigate different operators to compute Pareto-optimal solutions and implement our approach in the Ethereum blockchain.

This paper presents the vision of establishing a global service for Global IoT Device Discovery and Integration (GIDDI). The establishment of a GIDDI will: (1) make IoT application development more efficient and cost-effective via enabling sharing and reuse of existing IoT devices owned and maintained by different providers, and (2) promote deployment of new IoT devices supported by a revenue generation scheme for their providers. More specifically, this paper proposes a distributed IoT blockchain ledger that is specifically designed for managing the metadata needed to describe IoT devices and the data they produce. This GIDDI Blockchain is Internet-owned (i.e., it is not controlled by any individual or organization) and is Internet-scaled (i.e., it can support the discovery and reuse billions of IoT devices). The paper also proposes a GIDDI Marketplace that provides the functionality needed for IoT device registration, query, integration, payment and security via the proposed GIDDI Blockchain. We outline the GIDDI Blockchain and Marketplace implementation. We also discuss ongoing research for automatically mining the IoT Device metadata needed for IoT Device query and integration from the data produce. This significantly reduces the need for IoT device providers to supply the metadata descriptions the devices and the data they produce during the registration of IoT Devices in the GIDDI Blockchain.

In order to standardize and describe vulnerability information in detail as far as possible and realize knowledge sharing, reuse and extension at the semantic level, a vulnerability ontology is constructed based on the information security public databases such as CVE, CWE and CAPEC and industry public standards like CVSS. By analyzing the relationship between vulnerability class and weakness class, inference rules are defined to realize knowledge inference from vulnerability instance to its consequence and from one vulnerability instance to another vulnerability instance. The experimental results show that this model can analyze the causal and congeneric relationships between vulnerability instances, which is helpful to repair vulnerabilities and predict attacks.

Several assessment techniques and methodologies exist to analyze the security of an application dynamically. However, they either are focused on a particular product or are mainly concerned about the assessment process rather than the product's security confidence. Most crucially, they tend to assess the security of a target application as a standalone artifact without assessing its host infrastructure. Such attempts can undervalue the overall security posture since the infrastructure becomes crucial when it hosts a critical application. We present an ontology-based security model that aims to provide the necessary knowledge, including network settings, application configurations, testing techniques and tools, and security metrics to evaluate the security aptitude of a critical application in the context of its hosting infrastructure. The objective is to integrate the current good practices and standards in security testing and virtualization to furnish an on-demand and test-ready virtual target infrastructure to execute the critical application and to initiate a context-aware and quantifiable security assessment process in an automated manner. Furthermore, we present a security assessment architecture to reflect on how the ontology can be integrated into a standard process.

Because of the high-value data of an enterprise, sophisticated cyber-attacks targeted at enterprise networks have become prominent. Attack graphs are useful tools that facilitate a scalable security analysis of enterprise networks. However, the administrators face difficulties in effectively modelling security problems and making right decisions when constructing attack graphs as their risk assessment experience is often limited. In this paper, we propose an innovative method of security assessment through an ontology- and graph-based approach. An ontology is designed to represent security knowledge such as assets, vulnerabilities, attacks, countermeasures, and relationships between them in a common vocabulary. An efficient algorithm is proposed to generate an attack graph based on the inference ability of the security ontology. The proposed algorithm is evaluated with different sizes and topologies of test networks; the results show that our proposed algorithm facilitates a scalable security analysis of enterprise networks.