Title: A hierarchical method for assessing cyber security situation based on ontology and fuzzy cognitive maps

Authors: Zhijie Fan; Chengxiang Tan; Xin Li

Addresses: Electronics and Information Engineering School, Tongji University, Shanghai, China; Information Security Technology Department, The Third Research Institute of Ministry of Public Security, Shanghai, China ' Electronics and Information Engineering School, Tongji University, Shanghai, China ' Police Information and Engineering School, People's Public Security University of China, Beijing, China

Abstract: The hierarchical analysis method is widely used in the field of cyber security situation assessment. It is a key research topic. However, lots of them have paid less attention to the analysis of interrelationships among cyber security situation elements, and still have no effective cyber security events tracking capability. In this work, we proposed a hierarchical cyber security situation assessment method based on ontology and fuzzy cognitive maps (FCM). Firstly, we collected cyber security events from multiple ways and created a general cyber security risk events according to structured description of events based on ontology. Secondly, we generated semi-automatically the FCM structure according to general cyber security risk events using our FCM build method. Thirdly, we assessed and quantified cyber security situation based on ontology and FCM, and then determined the cyber security situation level according to relevant cyber security risk level table. At last, the cyber security events tracking capability was introduced. In our experiment, we used DARPA2000 dataset to verify and analyse our cyber security assessment method and explained tracing the high-risk events in target network. The result shows that our method can reflect the cyber security situation accurately and has the cyber security tracing capability.

Keywords: cyber security situation; situation assessment; hierarchical analysis; ontology; fuzzy cognitive maps; FCM; tracing back.

DOI: 10.1504/IJICS.2021.114704

International Journal of Information and Computer Security, 2021 Vol.14 No.3/4, pp.242 - 262

Received: 03 Apr 2017
Accepted: 29 Apr 2018
Published online: 04 May 2021 *

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