Ontology Based Security Threat Assessment and Mitigation for Cloud Systems

• Main Author: Kamongi, Patrick
• Other Authors: Kavi, Krishna
• Format: Others
• Language: English
• Published: University of North Texas 2018
• Subjects: Ontology; Cybersecurity; Cloud Computing; Vulnerability; Ranking; Threat; Risk; Prediction; Assessment; Mitigation; Systems; Computer networks > Security measures.; Computer security.; Cloud computing > Security measures.; Ontologies (Information retrieval)
• Online Access: https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc1404576/

A malicious actor often relies on security vulnerabilities of IT systems to launch a cyber attack. Most cloud services are supported by an orchestration of large and complex systems which are prone to vulnerabilities, making threat assessment very challenging. In this research, I developed formal and practical ontology-based techniques that enable automated evaluation of a cloud system's security threats. I use an architecture for threat assessment of cloud systems that leverages a dynamically generated ontology knowledge base. I created an ontology model and represented the components of a cloud system. These ontologies are designed for a set of domains that covers some cloud's aspects and information technology products' cyber threat data. The inputs to our architecture are the configurations of cloud assets and components specification (which encompass the desired assessment procedures) and the outputs are actionable threat assessment results. The focus of this work is on ways of enumerating, assessing, and mitigating emerging cyber security threats. A research toolkit system has been developed to evaluate our architecture. We expect our techniques to be leveraged by any cloud provider or consumer in closing the gap of identifying and remediating known or impending security threats facing their cloud's assets.