Ontology of Metrics for Cyber Security Assessment

Abstract

Development of metrics that are valuable for assessing security and decision making is an important element of efficient counteraction to cyber threats. The paper proposes an ontology of metrics for cyber security assessment. The developed ontology is based on determining the concepts and relations between primary features of initial security data and forming a set of hierarchically interconnected security metrics. The paper describes the main classes of the proposed ontology, the revealed relations, the involved security metrics, and the used data sources. The publicly available sources of security data are analyzed to get primary security metrics. Application of the approach is shown on a case study. The main feature of the proposed ontology is representation of security metrics as separate instances of ontology. It allows using the relations between the concepts of ontology for calculating integral metrics reflecting the security state.