ONTOLOGY EDITING TOOL FOR INFORMATION SECURITY
AND HUMAN FACTORS EXPERTS
John C. Mace, Simon Parkin and Aad van Moorsel
School of Computing Science & Centre for Cybercrime and Computing Security (CCCS)
Newcastle University, Newcastle, U.K.
Keywords: Information Security Ontology, Ontology Editor, Human Factors, OWL.
Abstract: Currently ontology development is facilitated by generic ontology editing tools which accommodate
ontology experts, and not necessarily those individuals whose knowledge requires capture. Furthermore the
process of knowledge capture is time consuming, error prone and requires appropriate technical skills. We
propose a graphical editing tool for ontology development which simplifies knowledge capture. To
demonstrate the tool’s potential this paper explores the need for information security and human factors
experts to capture their related knowledge in a dedicated ontology. Population of such an ontology would
provide supporting information to enable organisations to make more well informed security policy
decisions. Tailoring the tool for information security and human factors experts allows them to produce
ontology content without being familiar with ontology construction and technologies. The tool is intuitive,
requires no ontology component configuration, and provides mechanisms to guide users and reduce the
potential for errors. Our tool allows information security domain experts to develop and extend the
ontology, and organisations to tailor ontology content to their own requirements.
1 INTRODUCTION
There are instances where use of knowledge benefits
from encoding the knowledge in an ontology.
However, those in possession of the knowledge that
is to be captured may be unable to familiarise
themselves with ontology editing tools. This may be
because they do not have the appropriate technical
skills, or the time or inclination to understand
ontology technologies.
Here we present an ontology editing tool that
specifically serves a particular knowledge domain,
in such a way that it negates the need for knowledge
owners to understand ontology construction and
ontology languages. Users construct a graphical
representation of an ontology which can be
automatically translated into an OWL (Web
Ontology Language) encoded ontology.
The approach is demonstrated by applying the
tool to serve information security practitioners.
Within organisations it is essential to consider not
only external security guidelines and standards (e.g.
ISO27001 (BSI27001, 2005)), but also the impact of
security upon people and processes within the
organisation. If CISOs were able to augment their
own expertise of IT security with knowledge of
human-behavioural factors in information security
they would potentially make more informed security
policy decisions.
Applying this tool to information security policy-
making demonstrates a solution where there is a
need to formalise disparate, interconnected domain
knowledge supplied by individuals who require
assistance in the knowledge-capture process. It
cannot be assumed that these individuals are experts
in ontology development. We consider how Chief
Information Security Officers (CISOs) and human
factors experts would create and/or modify an
information security ontology that could
subsequently be tailored to specific organisations.
The tool addresses the need that these individuals
have for a direct and intuitive way to populate an
information security ontology with their
interconnected knowledge of security issues and
human-behavioural factors.
The rest of the paper is arranged as follows:
Section 2 discusses the need for such an ontology
and current construction approaches, alongside
related work in ontology tools and construction.
207
Mace J., Parkin S. and van Moorsel A..
ONTOLOGY EDITING TOOL FOR INFORMATION SECURITY AND HUMAN FACTORS EXPERTS.
DOI: 10.5220/0003092302070212
In Proceedings of the International Conference on Knowledge Management and Information Sharing (KMIS-2010), pages 207-212
ISBN: 978-989-8425-30-0
Copyright
c
2010 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)
Section 3 discusses the implementation of the editor
tool. Concluding remarks are presented in Section 4.
2 BACKGROUND
2.1 Need for an Information Security
Ontology
Currently, information security policy management
decisions within an organisation are driven by
external security standards and the experience of the
Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) or
similar.
However, policy decisions may affect or be
influenced by the behaviour of individuals within the
organisation. To make policy decision-making more
effective, organisations (and more so CISOs) must
have an awareness of the usability and other human-
behavioural factors inherent in these decisions
(Skidmore, 2003).
There is a need to organise and standardise
disparate IT security policy-making information and
human factors concerns in the form of a knowledge
base or ontology. This would facilitate clear and
effective communication within the IT-security
management community, thereby further informing
the security policy decision-making process.
2.2 Current Ontology Development
Currently the construction and/or modification of a
security ontology is achieved through an ontology
editing tool. These may come in the form of
graphical or textual editors. Both types of editor
allow content to be converted to a file written in an
ontology language.
Both of these types of editor place similar
demands on the user. The user must define the
overall structure for potential ontology content,
including concept types (ontology classes) and
relationship types (ontology properties). As content
is entered, each concept (ontology individuals) must
be individually defined along with its class type,
properties and relationship to other concepts.
This complex process assumes familiarity with
ontology technologies. As such a CISO or Human
Factors Researcher (HFR) may be unable to develop
ontology content themselves, and would require
either the assistance of an ontology expert or a
dedicated ontology editing tool that hides ontology
complexity.
2.3 Related Work
A large amount of work has been carried out in the
field of security ontologies and with the rising
interest in the Semantic Web this work is
supplemented with a vast array of ontology creation
tools.
The capture of security knowledge in an
ontology has been shown to be viable through a
number of studies e.g. (Parkin, 2009) and (Fenz,
2007). The work of Fenz et al (Fenz, 2007)
incorporates the ISO27001 guideline (BSI27001,
2005) with a security ontology that considers the
physical aspects of IT security management. This
work allows organisations to audit security polices
and assess whether they adhere to the ISO27001
guidelines.
For the successful development of a security
ontology, the use of an ontology editing tool is
required. A number of tools are already available
e.g. Protege 3.4.4 (Stanford, 2010), OntoStudio
(Ontoprise, 2010), TopBraid Composer
(TopQuadrant, 2010) and NeOn Toolkit (NeOn,
2010). Protégé 3.4.4 offers form-based content
entry, with ontology content presented in textual
format. Ontology content is organised into class,
property and individual hierarchies, in a manner
whose level of complexity is appropriate for an
ontology expert.
Another tool, SWOOP, (MINDSWAP, 2004)
offers a Web browser style user interface aimed at
the ‘average Web user’ to facilitate the easy
development and browsing of OWL ontologies.
Ontology navigation and editing is carried out via a
hyperlink based system. This approach enables both
ontology and domain experts to contribute but is still
reliant on ontology experts to contribute to the
underlying formal structure for that knowledge.
Visualisation of an ontology during its
construction or modification is of great advantage to
the user and eases these processes immensely. There
are a number of visual ontology creation tools using
OWL as a base language e.g. GrOWL (Vermont,
2006), OWL-S Editor (Scicluna, 2004) and
SemanticWorks (Altova, 2010) all of which
illustrate the ontology in a UML format. SemTalk 2
(Semtation, 2005) uses Microsoft Visio’s
functionality to create and modify ontologies
graphically, again in a UML format, translating
ontologies automatically to an OWL ontology file.
Although ontology creation is aided by the
graphical functions of these tools they still remain
relatively complex, require a certain amount of
initial training; and are generic in nature and not
KMIS 2010 - International Conference on Knowledge Management and Information Sharing
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designed specifically for security ontology creation
unlike our proposed tool.
The development of our tool has been based on
looking at the positive and relevant features from
currently available applications. The result is an
ontology editing tool designed specifically for
security domain experts, allowing them to capture
their knowledge in an easy and intuitive way while
removing the need to know of ontology construction
techniques.
2.4 Requirements
After review of related work and the problem space,
the main requirements of an ontology editing tool
for CISOs and HFRs have been identified:
Encourage Knowledge Capture. The tool must
capture the unstructured knowledge of domain
experts within a suitable formalised ontology
structure.
Hide Technical Details. A domain expert should
only need to concern themselves with adding
new information, without a need to manage the
underlying ontology structure.
Assist Knowledge Owners. Knowledge owners
perceive their knowledge in their own way. To
formalise knowledge correctly, users should be
actively assisted by the editor tool during
knowledge entry
Minimise Inconsistencies. There must be
mechanisms to minimise errors occurring in the
knowledge capture process.
3 IMPLEMENTATION
3.1 Components
In Figure 1 the ontology editor’s main components
can be seen.
Figure 1: Overview of ontology editor’s components.
3.1.1 Foundation Ontology
The editor uses an existing ontology (Parkin, 2009)
to define security issues and human-behavioural
factors, and crucially relate them to concepts within
an organisation’s security policies. For these
purposes we use a modified version of the ontology.
The concepts represented in the ontology are
shown in Figure 2. The ontology represents those
information
Assets that either must be secured or
which are crucial to an information security
management process. A Vulnerability may
represent the security and usability weaknesses of an
Asset that may promote or inhibit certain employee
behaviours. A
Vulnerability may be
exploitedBya Threat which renders the
Figure 2: Overview of the information security and human
factors ontology.
Asset insecure or unusable (thereby also
potentially affecting productivity). Exploitation of a
Vulnerability may be intentional or accidental.
A
Threat may be either an Infrastructure
Threat or a Procedural Threat. The former
represent activities that directly affect security
mechanisms, whereas the latter represent security
events that impact upon an individual and their
behaviour. The
Behavioural Foundation of a
Procedural Threat classifies behaviours to
indicate the concerns that they raise within an
organisation (e.g., a person’s memory capabilities or
attitude towards security).
A Vulnerability may be ‘mitigatedBy’ a
Behaviour Control, which represents a
procedural activity that a CISO can enact to manage
interactions between humans and organisational
security controls. The associated
Risk Control
Type indicates a risk management approach, such
ONTOLOGY EDITING TOOL FOR INFORMATION SECURITY AND HUMAN FACTORS EXPERTS
209
that a
Behaviour ControlmanagesRiskOf’ a
Threat.
3.1.2 Ontology Editor
The ontology editor offers the user a simple
graphical interface where they can enter and capture
their knowledge in graphical form (i.e. a graphical
representation of an information security ontology).
All aspects of the security ontology structure
(e.g. classes and properties) are pre-defined, and
with the integrated help system, diagram
construction (i.e. ontology population) is intended to
be simplified and intuitive.
The underlying ontology is not presented to the
user but used implicitly to derive the graphical
elements and to translate the diagram into OWL.
Figure 3: Screenshot of editor’s user interface.
To the right of the user interface are the available
controls (new/open/save diagram, create OWL file,
etc).
The main window of the editor interface, as
shown in Figure 3, is where ontology diagram
construction takes place, using an embedded
instance of the Microsoft Visio 2007’s drawing
control (Microsoft, 2010). Use of Visio is
appropriate for our tool as it is intended for use in
large organisations that are assumed to already have
Microsoft Office software available.
On the left of the drawing control is a list of pre-
defined shapes available for constructing diagrams.
Each shape contains individual data (name, colour,
size, etc) and can be re-used by dragging and
dropping onto the drawing page. The shapes consist
of boxes (ontology concepts) and arrows (ontology
relationships), each represented in a different colour
to help the user differentiate between them.
When using arrows to form ontology
relationships, the Visio auto-connect feature is
applied to assist in the process. This same feature
also maintains connections between shapes when a
shape is moved around the drawing area. This then
allows the user to manipulate the diagram according
to their needs without needing to manage
connections.
Figure 4: Dialog box for adding new concept.
A number of mechanisms are used to restrict the
potential for errors in the knowledge capture
process. Only certain boxes can be associated with
each other using certain types of arrows, removing
the potential for invalid connections. A further error
handling feature of the editor is the detection of
unconnected shapes (isolated boxes, unconnected
arrows, etc). If such “hanging” shapes are found,
saving of the ontology file is halted until the user
resolves the relevant errors.
An integrated help system is in place to aid the
user in diagram construction. When a new box
(concept) is created a dialog box explains what the
box represents, how it is used and how it may be
connected to other boxes in the diagram. An
example is shown in Figure 4. “Tool tips” actively
provide explanations of ontology components and
editor functions when the user floats the mouse
cursor over them.
3.1.3 Ontology File
When an ontology diagram is saved, information
about the ontology content is stored in XML format.
This facilitates translation into an Ontology File,
wherein ontology content is translated into the Web
Ontology Language (OWL) (W3C, 2004) format.
KMIS 2010 - International Conference on Knowledge Management and Information Sharing
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Figure 5: Overview of Translation Program’s components.
OWL files can potentially be processed
automatically by other software programs, thereby
providing scope for expert knowledge to be used in
various ways. Once created, all ontology files are
stored in a user designated file store.
Further knowledge may be added to pre-existing
ontology diagrams which is then propagated to the
corresponding ontology file. This removes the need
to regenerate the entire ontology.
3.1.4 Translation Program
The Translation Program processes Ontology
Diagrams to create Ontology Files.
The Java Translator Program is written in the
Java SE v1.5 programming language (Oracle, 2010)
and is deployed as an executable Java archive on a
user’s machine.
Figure 5 provides an overview of the
components involved in the translation process. This
process is two-fold: first an Ontology Diagram file is
processed to obtain relevant data; secondly, that data
is transformed into the OWL format before being
compiled into an ontology file. An entire diagram
can be translated into an ontology file via a single
operation, removing the need for successive
processing of each knowledge fragment.
Data is retrieved for each shape (instance) based
on its type, contained text (entered by user) and any
connections to other shapes. To write this data into
an ontology file, libraries from the OWL Java API
(Manchester, 2010) are used.
The classes and properties definitions of the
underlying information security ontology are hard-
coded into the Translation Program, and are written
directly to the ontology file. By predefining the
ontology structure the user is not expected to
understand or define ontology language constructs.
4 CONCLUSIONS
Information security management knowledge and
security human factors knowledge is currently vast
and fractured. This knowledge must be collated to
enable organisations to make more well informed
security policy decisions. Ontologies serve as a
means to store this knowledge.
Current ontology development utilises editing tools
which are mostly aimed at ontology experts, and not
necessarily those who hold the knowledge that must
be captured. This paper shows that there is a need
for an editing tool designed for information security
and human factors experts (amongst others) to
capture their interrelated knowledge in the form of
an ontology.
We describe a tool that produces machine-
readable OWL ontology files, derived from a
diagrammatic representation of information security
and human factors knowledge. Ontology concepts
and relationships are automatically translated from
diagram components into an OWL ontology file.
Our tool simplifies the ontology development
process, requiring little or no knowledge of ontology
construction on the part of the knowledge owner.
Future work hopes to see the development of a
community Web-based version of the editing tool to
facilitate collaborative knowledge capture across
wider communities of information security and
human factors experts.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The authors are supported in part by UK Technology
Strategy Board (TSB), grant nr. P0007E (“Trust
Economics”) and HP Labs Innovation Research
Program, award ID 2009-1052-1-A (“Prediction and
Provenance for Multi-Objective Information
Security Management”).
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