CICI: SSC: TrOnto - A Community-Based Ontology for a Trustworthy and ResiliCent Scientific Cyberspace

科学研究依赖于联网计算机的基础设施(网络基础设施)，需要确保这些基础设施免受恶意威胁和入侵。例如，如果大学医院的网络基础设施被攻破，临床试验受试者的隐私、医疗数据的完整性以及组织样本和培养的安全可能会受到损害。信息安全官(ISO)负责维护用于研究的安全网络基础设施，但他们的任务因新威胁出现的速度以及实验室和研究中心之间软件(通常是用不同语言编写的)和过时或专业硬件的激增而变得复杂。ISO在文档和在线讨论论坛中寻找解决入侵和漏洞的方法，但这是一个耗时的过程。为了简化这一过程，一个跨学科的研究团队正在开发一种计算机系统，可以自动、持续地从在线来源获取所有知识，并将其组织成一个概念和关系网络，可以查询和推理，使ISO领先于恶意攻击一步。该项目开发了一些相互关联的模块：1)一个子系统，它识别软件文件、咨询公告和在线技术论坛中的概念和关系，然后使用最先进的自然语言处理技术检索这些信息；2)网络安全本体，这是一个将检索到的概念和关系组织到一个逻辑网络中的知识表示系统，允许通过自动推理算法提取隐含的知识；以及3)查询界面，允许ISO工作人员访问本体中表示的知识，以找到他们关于网络安全问题的答案。这种创新的网络安全方法扩展了本体论在生物医学领域的使用，利用了将信息系统中的漏洞比作病毒或感染的比喻。尽管本体论创建的初始阶段将涉及人类专家的管理，但研究人员预计，由于使用了信息检索技术，系统本身可以自动完成，从而克服了本体论有用性的已知瓶颈之一。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Scientific research relies on an infrastructure of networked computers (cyberinfrastructure), which need to be secured against malicious threats and intrusions. For instance, the privacy of clinical trial subjects, the integrity of medical data, and the safety of tissue samples and cultures can be compromised if the cyberinfrastructure of a university hospital is breached. Information Security Officers (ISOs) are in charge of maintaining a secure cyberinfrastructure for research, but their task is complicated by the speed at which new threats emerge, and by the proliferation of software (often written in different languages) and obsolete or specialized hardware among labs and research centers. ISOs look for answers in their quest to fight intrusions and vulnerabilities in documentation and on-line discussion forums, but this is a time-consuming process. To streamline the process, an interdisciplinary team of researchers are developing a computer system to automatically and continuously harvest all that knowledge from online sources, organizing it into a network of concepts and relations that can be queried and reasoned upon to keep ISOs a step ahead of malicious attacks. The project develops a number of interconnected modules: 1) A sub-system that identifies concepts and relations in software documentation, advisory bulletins, and on-line technical forums, and then retrieves that information using state-of-the-art natural language processing techniques; 2) An ontology for cybersecurity, which is a knowledge representation system that organizes the retrieved concepts and relations into a logical network, allowing for implicit knowledge to be extracted by means of automatic reasoning algorithms, and; 3) A querying interface, which allows ISO staff to access the knowledge represented in the ontology to find answers to their questions about cybersecurity. This innovative approach to cybersecurity extends the use of ontologies in the biomedical field, leveraging the metaphor of vulnerabilities in information systems as viruses or infections. Even though the initial stages in the creation of the ontology will involve curation by human experts, the researchers expect that the system can itself automatically thanks to the use of information retrieval techniques, therefore overcoming one of the known bottlenecks in the usefulness of ontologies.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.