Network Security Situation Awareness Based on Semantic Ontology and User-Defined Rules for Internet of Things

Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT) brings the third development wave of the global information industry, which makes users, network, and perception devices cooperate more closely. However, if IoT has security problems, it may cause a variety of damage and even threaten human lives and properties. To improve the abilities of monitoring, providing emergency response, and predicting the development trend of IoT security, a new paradigm called network security situation awareness (NSSA) is proposed. However, it is limited by its ability to mine and evaluate security situation elements from multi-source heterogeneous network security information. To solve this problem, this paper proposes an IoT network security situation awareness model using a situation reasoning method based on semantic ontology and user-defined rules. Ontology technology can provide a unified and formalized description to solve the problem of semantic heterogeneity in the IoT security domain. In this paper, four key sub-domains are proposed to reflect an IoT security situation: context, attack, vulnerability, and network flow. Furthermore, user-defined rules can compensate for the limited description ability of ontology, and hence can enhance the reasoning ability of our proposed ontology model. The examples in real IoT scenarios show that the ability of the network security situation awareness that adopts our situation reasoning method is more comprehensive and more powerful reasoning abilities than the traditional NSSA methods.