Biblio
Over the last decade, a globalization of the software industry took place, which facilitated the sharing and reuse of code across existing project boundaries. At the same time, such global reuse also introduces new challenges to the software engineering community, with not only components but also their problems and vulnerabilities being now shared. For example, vulnerabilities found in APIs no longer affect only individual projects but instead might spread across projects and even global software ecosystem borders. Tracing these vulnerabilities at a global scale becomes an inherently difficult task since many of the existing resources required for such analysis still rely on proprietary knowledge representation. In this research, we introduce an ontology-based knowledge modeling approach that can eliminate such information silos. More specifically, we focus on linking security knowledge with other software knowledge to improve traceability and trust in software products (APIs). Our approach takes advantage of the Semantic Web and its reasoning services, to trace and assess the impact of security vulnerabilities across project boundaries. We present a case study, to illustrate the applicability and flexibility of our ontological modeling approach by tracing vulnerabilities across project and resource boundaries.
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.
The Semantic Web can be used to enable the interoperability of IoT devices and to annotate their functional and nonfunctional properties, including security and privacy. In this paper, we will show how to use the ontology and JSON-LD to annotate connectivity, security and privacy properties of IoT devices. Out of that, we will present our prototype for a lightweight, secure application level protocol wrapper that ensures communication consistency, secrecy and integrity for low cost IoT devices like the ESP8266 and Photon particle.
This brief paper reports on an early stage ongoing PhD project in the field of cyber-physical security in health care critical infrastructures. The research overall aims to develop a methodology that will increase the ability of secure recovery of health critical infrastructures. This ambitious or reckless attempt, as it is currently at an early stage, in this paper, tries to answer why cyber-physical security for health care infrastructures is important and of scientific interest. An initial PhD project methodology and expected outcomes are also discussed. The report concludes with challenges that emerge and possible future directions.
The smart grid is a complex cyber-physical system (CPS) that poses challenges related to scale, integration, interoperability, processes, governance, and human elements. The US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and its government, university and industry collaborators, developed an approach, called CPS Framework, to reasoning about CPS across multiple levels of concern and competency, including trustworthiness, privacy, reliability, and regulatory. The approach uses ontology and reasoning techniques to achieve a greater understanding of the interdependencies among the elements of the CPS Framework model applied to use cases. This paper demonstrates that the approach extends naturally to automated and manual decision-making for smart grids: we apply it to smart grid use cases, and illustrate how it can be used to analyze grid topologies and address concerns about the smart grid. Smart grid stakeholders, whose decision making may be assisted by this approach, include planners, designers and operators.
This paper presents an ontological approach to perceive the current security status of the network. Computer network is a dynamic entity whose state changes with the introduction of new services, installation of new network operating system, and addition of new hardware components, creation of new user roles and by attacks from various actors instigated by aggressors. Various security mechanisms employed in the network does not give the complete picture of security of complete network. In this paper we have proposed taxonomy and ontology which may be used to infer impact of various events happening in the network on security status of the network. Vulnerability, Network and Attack are the main taxonomy classes in the ontology. Vulnerability class describes various types of vulnerabilities in the network which may in hardware components like storage devices, computing devices or networks devices. Attack class has many subclasses like Actor class which is entity executing the attack, Goal class describes goal of the attack, Attack mechanism class defines attack methodology, Scope class describes size and utility of the target, Automation level describes the automation level of the attack Evaluation of security status of the network is required for network security situational awareness. Network class has network operating system, users, roles, hardware components and services as its subclasses. Based on this taxonomy ontology has been developed to perceive network security status. Finally a framework, which uses this ontology as knowledgebase has been proposed.
Dynamic firewalls with stateful inspection have added a lot of security features over the stateless traditional static filters. Dynamic firewalls need to be adaptive. In this paper, we have designed a framework for dynamic firewalls based on probabilistic ontology using Multi Entity Bayesian Networks (MEBN) logic. MEBN extends ordinary Bayesian networks to allow representation of graphical models with repeated substructures and can express a probability distribution over models of any consistent first order theory. The motivation of our proposed work is about preventing novel attacks (i.e. those attacks for which no signatures have been generated yet). The proposed framework is in two important parts: first part is the data flow architecture which extracts important connection based features with the prime goal of an explicit rule inclusion into the rule base of the firewall; second part is the knowledge flow architecture which uses semantic threat graph as well as reasoning under uncertainty to fulfill the required objective of providing futuristic threat prevention technique in dynamic firewalls.
Nowadays, our surrounding environment is more and more scattered with various types of sensors. Due to their intrinsic properties and representation formats, they form small islands isolated from each other. In order to increase interoperability and release their full capabilities, we propose to represent devices descriptions including data and service invocation with a common model allowing to compose mashups of heterogeneous sensors. Pushing this paradigm further, we also propose to augment service descriptions with a discovery protocol easing automatic assimilation of knowledge. In this work, we describe the architecture supporting what can be called a Semantic Sensor Web-of-Things. As proof of concept, we apply our proposal to the domain of smart buildings, composing a novel ontology covering heterogeneous sensing, actuation and service invocation. Our architecture also emphasizes on the energetic aspect and is optimized for constrained environments.
In order to identify a personalized story, suitable for the needs of large masses of visitors and tourists, our work has been aimed at the definition of appropriate models and solutions of fruition that make the visit experience more appealing and immersive. This paper proposes the characteristic functionalities of narratology and of the techniques of storytelling for the dynamic creation of experiential stories on a sematic basis. Therefore, it represents a report about sceneries, implementation models and architectural and functional specifications of storytelling for the dynamic creation of functional contents for the visit. Our purpose is to indicate an approach for the realization of a dynamic storytelling engine that can allow the dynamic supply of narrative contents, not necessarily predetermined and pertinent to the needs and the dynamic behaviors of the users. In particular, we have chosen to employ an adaptive, social and mobile approach, using an ontological model in order to realize a dynamic digital storytelling system, able to collect and elaborate social information and contents about the users giving them a personalized story on the basis of the place they are visiting. A case of study and some experimental results are presented and discussed.
Scientific datasets and the experiments that analyze them are growing in size and complexity, and scientists are facing difficulties to share such resources. Some initiatives have emerged to try to solve this problem. One of them involves the use of scientific workflows to represent and enact experiment execution. There is an increasing number of workflows that are potentially relevant for more than one scientific domain. However, it is hard to find workflows suitable for reuse given an experiment. Creating a workflow takes time and resources, and their reuse helps scientists to build new workflows faster and in a more reliable way. Search mechanisms in workflow repositories should provide different options for workflow discovery, but it is difficult for generic repositories to provide multiple mechanisms. This paper presents WorkflowHunt, a hybrid architecture for workflow search and discovery for generic repositories, which combines keyword and semantic search to allow finding relevant workflows using different search methods. We validated our architecture creating a prototype that uses real workflows and metadata from myExperiment, and compare search results via WorkflowHunt and via myExperiment's search interface.
Many surveillance cameras are using everywhere, the videos or images captured by these cameras are still dumped but they are not processed. Many methods are proposed for tracking and detecting the objects in the videos but we need the meaningful content called semantic content from these videos. Detecting Human activity recognition is quite complex. The proposed method called Semantic Content Extraction (SCE) from videos is used to identify the objects and the events present in the video. This model provides useful methodology for intruder detecting systems which provides the behavior and the activities performed by the intruder. Construction of ontology enhances the spatial and temporal relations between the objects or features extracted. Thus proposed system provides a best way for detecting the intruders, thieves and malpractices happening around us.
The objective of this paper is to explore the current notions of systems and “System of Systems” and establish the case for quantitative characterization of their structural, behavioural and contextual facets that will pave the way for further formal development (mathematical formulation). This is partly driven by stakeholder needs and perspectives and also in response to the necessity to attribute and communicate the properties of a system more succinctly, meaningfully and efficiently. The systematic quantitative characterization framework proposed will endeavor to extend the notion of emergence that allows the definition of appropriate metrics in the context of a number of systems ontologies. The general characteristic and information content of the ontologies relevant to system and system of system will be specified but not developed at this stage. The current supra-system, system and sub-system hierarchy is also explored for the formalisation of a standard notation in order to depict a relative scale and order and avoid the seemingly arbitrary attributions.
A wide variety of security software systems need to be integrated into a Security Orchestration Platform (SecOrP) to streamline the processes of defending against and responding to cybersecurity attacks. Lack of interpretability and interoperability among security systems are considered the key challenges to fully leverage the potential of the collective capabilities of different security systems. The processes of integrating security systems are repetitive, time-consuming and error-prone; these processes are carried out manually by human experts or using ad-hoc methods. To help automate security systems integration processes, we propose an Ontology-driven approach for Security OrchestrAtion Platform (OnSOAP). The developed solution enables interpretability, and interoperability among security systems, which may exist in operational silos. We demonstrate OnSOAP's support for automated integration of security systems to execute the incident response process with three security systems (Splunk, Limacharlie, and Snort) for a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. The evaluation results show that OnSOAP enables SecOrP to interpret the input and output of different security systems, produce error-free integration details, and make security systems interoperable with each other to automate and accelerate an incident response process.
Recently personal information due to the APT attack, the economic damage and leakage of confidential information is a serious social problem, a great deal of research has been done to solve this problem. APT attacks are threatening traditional hacking techniques as well as to increase the success rate of attacks using sophisticated attack techniques such attacks Zero-Day vulnerability in order to avoid detection techniques and state-of-the-art security because it uses a combination of intelligence. In this paper, the malicious code is designed to detect APT attack based on APT attack behavior ontology that occur during the operation on the target system, it uses intelligent APT attack than to define inference rules can be inferred about malicious attack behavior to propose a method that can be detected.
The Sensor Web is evolving into a complex information space, where large volumes of sensor observation data are often consumed by complex applications. Provenance has become an important issue in the Sensor Web, since it allows applications to answer “what”, “when”, “where”, “who”, “why”, and “how” queries related to observations and consumption processes, which helps determine the usability and reliability of data products. This paper investigates characteristics and requirements of provenance in the Sensor Web and proposes an interoperable approach to building a provenance model for the Sensor Web. Our provenance model extends the W3C PROV Data Model with Sensor Web domain vocabularies. It is developed using Semantic Web technologies and thus allows provenance information of sensor observations to be exposed in the Web of Data using the Linked Data approach. A use case illustrates the applicability of the approach.
Securing their critical documents on the cloud from data threats is a major challenge faced by organizations today. Controlling and limiting access to such documents requires a robust and trustworthy access control mechanism. In this paper, we propose a semantically rich access control system that employs an access broker module to evaluate access decisions based on rules generated using the organizations confidentiality policies. The proposed system analyzes the multi-valued attributes of the user making the request and the requested document that is stored on a cloud service platform, before making an access decision. Furthermore, our system guarantees an end-to-end oblivious data transaction between the organization and the cloud service provider using oblivious storage techniques. Thus, an organization can use our system to secure their documents as well as obscure their access pattern details from an untrusted cloud service provider.
Policy design is an important part of software development. As security breaches increase in variety, designing a security policy that addresses all potential breaches becomes a nontrivial task. A complete security policy would specify rules to prevent breaches. Systematically determining which, if any, policy clause has been violated by a reported breach is a means for identifying gaps in a policy. Our research goal is to help analysts measure the gaps between security policies and reported breaches by developing a systematic process based on semantic reasoning. We propose SEMAVER, a framework for determining coverage of breaches by policies via comparison of individual policy clauses and breach descriptions. We represent a security policy as a set of norms. Norms (commitments, authorizations, and prohibitions) describe expected behaviors of users, and formalize who is accountable to whom and for what. A breach corresponds to a norm violation. We develop a semantic similarity metric for pairwise comparison between the norm that represents a policy clause and the norm that has been violated by a reported breach. We use the US Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) as a case study. Our investigation of a subset of the breaches reported by the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) reveals the gaps between HIPAA and reported breaches, leading to a coverage of 65%. Additionally, our classification of the 1,577 HHS breaches shows that 44% of the breaches are accidental misuses and 56% are malicious misuses. We find that HIPAA's gaps regarding accidental misuses are significantly larger than its gaps regarding malicious misuses.