Ontology-based Approach to Enhance Security in Network Architecture and in System Design

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The size of the data that we collect daily and the scope of the software systems that we build are the driving forces behind many digital transformations. The discovery of powerful distinguishing features, whether within data sets or within families of systems, is extremely useful. It allows us to better design dependable and secure systems. Currently, our capacity is quite limited in analyzing data for the purpose of securing increasingly complex systems and better molding the developed systems to meet security and privacy needs. We need better techniques for gaining new knowledge from the huge volume of data flowing through our diverse systems and to use this knowledge to better shield them from security threats. The long-term goal of this research program falls under further exploring the fundamentals governing knowledge generation within networks of resources. The scope of our work is within the area of agile and autonomous security systems. As application of our foundational work, we intend to explore better defense mechanisms, conceive designs and architectures for secure networked systems, and build software systems that are secure by design. Our research program explores novel ways to discover characteristics contained in data sets interpreted within a domain. We will be exploring a novel ontology framework that is suitable for organized data-sets. We will build security-related ontologies. We aim at using our ontology framework and the developed security related ontologies to extract security-related knowledge. Within a security context, by interpreting  the data flowing through the network or the data about the security situation, we generate information that can be generalized into data-grounded knowledge. The gained knowledge from the analyzed data will be used to on-the-fly amend the architecture of the network or strengthen the security mechanisms. To increase the performance and the usability of the defense-mechanisms deployed on software systems and networks, we will explore ontology modularisation techniques to enable several agents to cooperate on a security task.  We will articulate a high level language for specifying ontologies. We will also propose reasoning mechanisms and tools that support the scalability of our solutions for networked systems.