Toward an Ontological Cyberattack Framework to Secure Smart Cities with Machine Learning Support

Abstract

With the emergence and the movement toward the Internet of Things (IoT), one of the most significant applications that have gained a great deal of concern is smart cities. In smart cities, IoT is leveraged to manage life and services within a minimal, or even no, human intervention. IoT paradigm has created opportunities for a wide variety of cyberattacks to threaten systems and users. Many challenges have been faced in order to encounter IoT cyberattacks, such as the diversity of attacks and the frequent appearance of new attacks. This raises the need for a general and uniform representation of cyberattacks. Ontology proposed in this paper can be used to develop a generalized framework, and to provide a comprehensive study of potential cyberattacks in a smart city system. Ontology can serve in building this intended general framework by developing a description and a knowledge base for cyberattacks as a set of concepts and relation between them. In this article we have proposed an ontology to describe cyberattacks, we have identified the benefits of such ontology, and discussed a case study to show how we can we utilize the proposed ontology to implement a simple intrusion detection system with the assistance of Machine Learning (ML). The ontology is implemented using protégé ontology editor and framework, WEKA is utilized as well to construct the inference rules of the proposed ontology. Results show that intrusion detection system developed using the ontology has shown a good performance in revealing the occurrence of different cyber-attacks, accuracy has reached 97% in detecting cyber-attacks in a smart city system.