Abstract
Ontologies are used in almost any domain; they have been used both in the public and private domains. In the latter case, we will face security problems, where encryption may be a solution. In this case, one can encrypt their ontology file with any encryption standard, delete the original file and store the encrypted one. When exploiting the ontology, the user should decrypt the encrypted file on the fly and make the needed reasoning. In this paper, we introduce an enhanced method for encrypting web ontologies. This method consists of maintaining the ontology structure (schema) while encrypting only the ontology data. We found that the enhanced method is at least ten times faster than the basic method. With such results, we believe that existing tools for querying or making reasoning on ontologies can be rewritten to take advantage of this method in the case of ontology security.
Highlights
Over the past decade, the web has expanded exponentially [1]
When working on private ontologies developed for private uses where data is sensitive, we face security issues that we can resolve by encrypting the ontology file [3]
First step: The input Ontology file is transformed to two files: the first one represents the same ontology file except the private data which is replaced by two integers with no impact on the security and the second one is an encrypted file which contains the sensitive data in ciphertext format
Summary
One of its new key features is the semantic web [2]. In this kind of web, ontologies are regarded as its cornerstone; they have been developed in biology, biomedicine, linguistics, entertainment, etc. When working on private ontologies developed for private uses where data is sensitive, we face security issues that we can resolve by encrypting the ontology file [3]. Such encrypted file is useless until it is decrypted where data comes back into its structured state. The approach of this method is to encrypt the sensitive data of the ontology while keeping its structure (schema) untouched; the result is a file containing the encrypted data and a file containing the same ontology structure with, for each individual, pointers to the place (offset) in the encrypted file where the encrypted individual’s content is written
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