=Paper= {{Paper |id=Vol-199/paper-6 |storemode=property |title=The Evaluation Process of a Computer Security Incident Ontology |pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-199/wonto-06.pdf |volume=Vol-199 |dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/wonto/MartimianoM06 }} ==The Evaluation Process of a Computer Security Incident Ontology== https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-199/wonto-06.pdf
The Evaluation Process of a Computer Security
              Incident Ontology

                  Luciana A. F. Martimiano and Edson Moreira

                    Departamento de Ciências de Computação,
               Instituto de Ciências Matemáticas e de Computação,
                 Universidade de São Paulo - Campus São Carlos,
              Caixa Postal 668, CEP 13560-970, São Carlos, SP, Brazil
                    luciana@icmc.usp.br, edson@icmc.usp.br



       Abstract. Ontologies have been developed and used by several re-
       searchers in different knowledge domains aiming to ease the structur-
       ing and management of knowledge, and to create a unique standard to
       represent concepts of such a knowledge domain. Considering the com-
       puter security domain, several tools can be used to manage and store
       security information. These tools generate a great amount of security
       alerts, which are stored in different formats. This lack of standard and
       the amount of data make the tasks of the security administrators even
       harder, because they have to understand, using their tacit knowledge,
       different security alerts to make correlation and solve security problems.
       Aiming to assist the administrators in executing these tasks efficiently,
       this paper presents the main features of the computer security incident
       ontology developed to model, using a unique standard, the concepts of
       the security incident domain, and how the ontology has been evaluated.


1     Introduction
Security data can be generated by different sources, such as access systems logs,
firewall logs, vulnerabilities alerts, and statistics of processors or memory use.
Due to this great volume of information, the security administrators face out a
difficult problem, which is efficiently generate knowledge about security to make
decisions and solve security incidents.
    Besides this volume of information, the security tools generate data in dif-
ferent formats, making the security management even harder. Some research
institutes, such as CVE Project (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures) [1]
and CERT/CC (Computer Emergency Response Team/Coordination Center)1
have made efforts to classify and store security data using a unique standard.
However, these institutes do not attribute semantic to the data stored and pub-
lished. Without the semantic meaning, the software agents or the administrators
are unable to automatically make implicit correlations among security incidents.
    To ease and make it possible to automatically correlate different security data
from different sources, and also to ease information management about security
1
    http://www.cert.org/.
incidents, we propose to use ontologies, defining a unique vocabulary of concepts
and relations related to security incidents2 .
    According to Gruber [2], ontology is explicit formal specifications of the con-
cepts in a domain and the relations among them. Ontology defines a common
vocabulary for a community of people, such as researchers and security adminis-
trators, and for software agents that need to share information and need to have
a common understanding about a domain knowledge. Ontologies consist of a set
of concepts, relations, and axioms that formalize a field of interest, with detail
and structure that enable computers to process its content.
    Some reasons to develop and to use ontologies are [3, 4]:

 – Sharing common understanding of the structured information
   among people or software agents. For instance, suppose that several
   Web sites contain information about vulnerabilities. If these Web sites share
   and publish the same ontology of the concepts and relations they use, soft-
   ware agents can extract and aggregate information from these different sites,
   using them to answer queries about vulnerabilities or as input data to other
   applications.
 – Reusing knowledge. If one group of researchers develops an ontology, oth-
   ers can simply reuse it, saving efforts. For instance, the Computer Security
   Incident Ontology (OntoSec) [5, 6] developed and described in this paper
   reuses some concepts and relations of the Vulnerability Ontology developed
   by Brandão [7]. Or, a network management ontology could reuse and extend
   the class Asset defined by OntoSec to represent the assets that can be
   attacked in a computational system.
 – Interoperability. Different applications can use the concepts and the re-
   lations defined by an Ontology (e.g. OntoSec) to extract and infer useful
   information to deal with vulnerabilities, easing the interoperability that al-
   lows sharing data among different applications.

    The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 presents some
security issues. Section 3 briefly presents the related works. Section 4 presents
the Security Incident Ontology developed and its main features. The ontology
validation process is presented in Section 5. Section 6 presents the main benefits
of using ontology to help security management. And, finally, Section 7 presents
final remarks and future works.


2     Computational Security Issues

According to Gollmann [8], computational security deals with the prevention and
the detection of unauthorized actions done in a computational system, its infor-
mation and resources. A secure system must satisfy some important features:
confidentiality, integrity, availability and authentication. Confidentiality assures
2
    A security incident is “the act of violating an explicit or implied security policy”,
    which is a CERT/CC definition.
that only authorized people or systems access the information, and it is related
to the Authentication, which ensures that the user is really who he/she says. In-
tegrity ensures that the information is not modified accidentally or maliciously.
Availability ensures that the system works with no degradation and provides
resources whenever authorized users need. The satisfaction grade is defined by
a security policy, which creates the rules of what is and what is not allowed in
the system.
    Along the years, the volume of security data that the security administrators
have to manage has grown exponentially. Unfortunately, managing these data
and information has became more and more difficult, because different security
tools generate alerts in a different standard and with different kinds of data, and
the administrators, using their tacit knowledge, have to correlate and analyze
these data.
    In this sense, it is important to define a way to generate the security data
in a unique standard, including a unique vocabulary of concepts and their re-
lations. This unique vocabulary allows the security administrators to manage
and correlate different security incidents automatically, and also make it pos-
sible to implement countermeasures to solve security incidents more efficiently
and to ensure the important features already mentioned, namely confidentiality,
integrity, availability and authentication.


3   Related Works

Howard and Longstaff [9] developed a common language for security incidents.
This common language is a high-level taxonomy of security incidents concepts.
The taxonomy was based primarily on security incident theory, but the expe-
rience in incidents classification of CERT was used to refine and expand the
taxonomy. Basically, the incident taxonomy defines concepts as attacker, tool,
vulnerability and security incident. OntoSec reuses some of the concepts
defined in the security incident taxonomy.
    Two relevant works are the ones conducted by Raskin et al. [10] and Schu-
macher [11]. Raskin et al. proposed the use of natural language to define, in an
unique way, the meaning of the main concepts about security incidents. Basi-
cally, the ontology is composed by two parts: a set of high-level concepts and
a method of classifying them as a taxonomy. Schumacher proposed the Core
Security Ontology to represent a conceptual mapping of security policies. The
ontology represents the top-level security concepts and how they related them-
selves. Depending on the organization and its security policies, these concepts
can be specialized and new ones can be created. Both works propose an abstract
and high level vision of security management.
    OntoSec, on the other hand, represents not only the concepts but also the
relations among the concepts of the security incident domain. It also proposes a
more concrete vision of security management, because it specializes these main
concepts.
4   The Security Incident Ontology

To develop the OntoSec, two methodologies were used: the Methontology,
developed by Fernández et al. [12], and the methodology developed by Noy and
McGuinness [3]. The Methontology was used to guide all the ontology devel-
opment process, because it was developed taking IEEE standard for developing
Software Life Cycle Processes (IEEE 1074-1995) [13] as a starting document,
and it has its roots in a methodology for developing Knowledge-Based Systems
(IDEAL [14]) [15]. The methodology developed by Noy and McGuinness was
used to guide the conceptualization phase because it defines clearly what should
be done, and how it should be done.
    Most of the concepts in the OntoSec were compiled using security inci-
dent glossaries and taxonomies [16, 9, 17]. Besides these sources, the CSIRT/USP
(Computer Security Incident Response Team/Universidade de São Paulo)3 was
also used.
    After defining the concepts and the relations among them, the OntoSec was
formalized using the W3C4 standard language for modeling ontologies - OWL
(Web Ontology Language) [18] and the Protégé tool, which is a free, open-source
ontology editor and knowledge-base framework5 .
    OntoSec has four levels of classes (or concepts). These four levels represent
the main concepts related to the security incident domain. The first level has 13
classes, which are presented in Figure 1, the second one has 11 classes, which
are the subclasses of the main level, the third one has 14 classes, which are the
subclasses of the second level, and the fourth one has 11 classes, which are the
subclasses of the third level, summing up 49 classes. Besides these classes, the
OntoSec has 36 non-hierarchical relations and 58 attributes, summing up 94
properties. The first level represents the “core” of the OntoSec.
    Figure 1 presents the main concepts and relations, which are: an Agent per-
forms an Attack that can cause a Security Incident. To perform an Attack,
an Agent can use a Tool, which can explore a Vulnerability, to get Access.
The Security Incident implies to a Consequence and acts on an Asset.
The Security Incident also can have a PreCondition, and this PreCondi-
tion can be related to a Vulnerability. A Consequence can be related to an
Asset and a Security Incident can precede or/and proceed another one6 . A
Vulnerability can be explored with other ones, it can has another vulnerability
as precondition, or it can be precondition to other vulnerabilities. It also has a
Correction, which is developed by a Supplier, a Type and a Range.
    The vulnerabilities are represented by the Vulnerability Ontology. The Vul-
nerability Ontology models the main concepts and relations about the vulnera-
bility domain. These concepts and relations were defined based on CVE Project

3
  http://www.security.usp.br/.
4
  World Wide Web Consortium.
5
  http://protege.stanford.edu/.
6
  The relations precedes and proceeds are inverse, transitive, symmetric and reflexive.
and the NVD (National Vulnerability Database)7 . And, some of these concepts
and relations are imported by OntoSec8 . The main concepts imported are:
Vulnerability, Type, Correction, Range and Supplier.
    Some classes represent a taxonomy, with isA relations, which are specializa-
tion and can be also called hyponymy relation. For instance, the class Asset has
as sub-classes: Data, Hardware, Port, Resource, RootAccount, Software
and UserAccount. The isA relations are represented using two constructors,
one in OWL and the other in RDF Schema (Resource Description Framework
Schema)[19]: owl:class and rdfs:subClassOf, respectively.




               Fig. 1. Main concepts and relations of the OntoSec


   To identify a security incident, some attributes were defined: hasip source
(computers from where a security incident begins), hasip destination (com-
puter being attacked), hassecurity incident type (27 security incidents types
are represented in OntoSec), has date (the date the security incident oc-
7
  NVD is a searchable index of information on computer vulnerabilities and was known
  as ICAT Metabase. http://nvd.nist.gov/.
8
  The label ontovul denotes this importing.
curred), has time (the time the security incident occurred), has description
(describe the security incident), has reference (any Web site with information
about the security incident), has weekday (week day in which the security in-
cident occurred), has severity (how serious is the security incident). This last
attribute can have the following predefined values: Low, Medium or High.
    All attributes are represented in OWL as a Datatype Property. This prop-
erty also defines which are the Domain Resource and the Range Resource. In
this case, the Domain Resource is the class which has the attribute and the
Range Resource is the type of attribute. Similarly to the Object Property,
the Datatype Property also can have a restriction as cardinality, represent-
ing how many instances the property can have. It is also possible to predefine
instances. For example, the attribute has severity can have only one of the
following instances: Low, Medium or High.


5     OntoSec Evaluation Process
The ontology evaluation process is the problem of assessing the quality of a given
ontology, either to aid in the selection of an ontology for the needs of a particular
task or organization, or to evaluate or guide an ontology constructing effort [20].
    Several approaches have been developed to evaluate an ontology, depending
on what kind of ontologies are being evaluated and for what purpose. Some ap-
proaches are: to use the ontology in an application [21], to compare the ontology
to a “golden standard” of the domain [22], to compare the ontology with a source
of data or documents about the domain that is represented by the ontology -
the “data driven” approach [23, 24], and to assess how well the ontology meets a
set of predefined criteria, standards and requirements, etc. [25].
    To validate the OntoSec, the approach defined by [23, 24] was used, because
this approach defines a way to check if the ontology is representing the concepts
of such a domain knowledge. In this sense, security alerts from SNORT was
used to check how well OntoSec cover the security incident domain. SNORT
is an open-source network intrusion prevention and detection system based on a
rule-driven language9 .

5.1    Validation Process
The main aim of the validation process is to show that OntoSec represents
important information about security incidents correctly. Besides that, it is also
important to show that OntoSec can help the security administrators to deal
with security incidents problems more efficiently, querying the ontology about
security incidents. The validation process has been carried out in two phases:

 1. Mapping security incident data into OntoSec, which has been done.
 2. Developing an application to query and infer security incident information
    from OntoSec, which is under development.
9
    http://www.snort.org/.
Mapping Security Incident Data. Security alerts generated by SNORT were
used to validate the OntoSec. SNORT generates intrusion alerts based on rules
according to signatures of attacks. The following example shows an alert gen-
erated by SNORT. Line 1 presents the alert description and line 2 presents its
classification and priority (severity) according to SNORT configuration. Line
3 presents when (date and time) this alert occurred and which are the source
IP, source port, destination IP and destination port used. Lines 4 to 8 present
URLs10 where it is possible to find information about the alert.
1 [**] [1:1421:11] SNMP AgentX/tcp request [**]
2 [Classification: Attempted Information Leak] [Priority: 2]
3 01/20-11:11:38.672417 192.168.0.253:111 -> 192.168.0.18:705
4 [Xref => http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=2002-0013]
5 [Xref => http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=2002-0012]
6 [Xref => http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/4132]
7 [Xref => http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/4089]
8 [Xref => http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/4088]


    To support OntoSec validation process, a tool was developed using Java and
Jena11 . This tool does the mapping of the security alerts generated by SNORT
into OntoSec, creating a security knowledge base that is used in the next phase
of the validation process (query and inference). As RDF has a simple data model
that is easy for applications to process and manipulate and RDFt’s generality of-
fers greater value from sharing, it is used to store the security incident knowledge
base instead of storing the base inside the ontology itself.
    The following RDF code represents the information about the “SNMP
AgentX/tcp request” alert. For each rdf:description, RDF creates a nodeID.
The nodeIDs are also used to relate a security incident to the logical ports
(rdf:nodeID=A5151) and to the protocols (rdf:nodeID=A3989) used during the
attack.

   
    SNMP AgentX/tcp request
    Scanning
    Friday
    11:11:38
    2006-01-20
    192.168.0.253
    192.168.0.18
    Medium
    http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=2002-0013
       
    http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=2002-0012
       
    http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/4132
    http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/4089
    http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/4088
    
    


     

10
     Universal Resource Locator.
11
     Jena is an open-source Java framework for building Semantic Web applications.
     http://jena.sourceforge.net/.
     111
     705



     
     TCP
   




     The tool is composed by two parts: one responsible to collect and structure
the SNORT alerts, and another to do the mapping into the ontology. As the tool
was developed using a modular structure, the task of integrating new security
tools is easier, only the interface between the mapping tool and the security tool
has to be modified. As SNORT generates security alerts using a standard (text
files), to get the security data was an easy task to be done. A security alert file
of 600KBytes were use. This alert file generated a security incident knowledge
base of 20MBytes. This knowledge base is stored in a MySQL12 database13 . Jena
framework was used to store the RDF file in the database. Herein, it is important
to point out that not necessarily the security alerts generated by SNORT are
really security incidents, many of these alerts are false-positives. But the security
alerts were used to know how well the OntoSec models security incidents.
     Some data could be directly mapped into OntoSec, such as description,
date, time, source and destination IP, source and destination port. But others,
as the incident type, could not be because SNORT uses its own standard types
of incidents. In this case, a previous task was done in which a type of incident in
SNORT was mapping into a type of incident in OntoSec. For instance, the types
Attempted Information Leak and Detection of a Network Scan were mapping
as type Scanning in OntoSec, the types A Network Trojan was detected, A
suspicious string was detected and Executable code was detected were mapped as
Malicious Code.
     Some attributes, such as source and destination port, and protocol, are
mapped as relations between SecurityIncident and Asset classes, because in
OntoSec a protocol and a port are modeled as potential targets (assets) of such
a security incident.
     Table 1 shows an example of how some attributes were mapped into the at-
tributes of the SecurityIncident class, the Port and the Protocol classes
in OntoSec. From the date, the day of the week is calculated and the
has weekday attribute in OntoSec is used to represent it.
     It is possible to notice that OntoSec models important information about
security incident domain. On the other hand, it is also possible to see that the
ontology is modeling information that a security tool does not represent, such as
the consequences of a security incident. In this sense, according to the type of the
security incident, the ontology can be used to infer which are the consequences.
For instance, a Dos (Denial of Service), DDos (Distribuited Denial of Service) or
12
     http://www.mysql.com/.
13
     To perform previous tests with the knowledge base, it was stored firstly in a text file
         Table 1. Mapping SNORT attributes into the OntoSec attributes

           SNORT Attributes OntoSec Attributes              Class
              description         has description      SecurityIncident
             classification  hassecurity incident type SecurityIncident
                  date               has date          SecurityIncident
                  hour               has hour          SecurityIncident
                source IP          hasip source        SecurityIncident
             destination IP      hasip destination     SecurityIncident
                reference          has reference       SecurityIncident
                priority           has severity        SecurityIncident
              source port     has sourceportnumber           Port
            destination port has destinyportnumber           Port
                protocol        hasprotocol name          Protocol


a Buffer Overflow can compromise the availability of the system. Or a Malicious
Code can allow a remote execution or can compromise data confidentiality.

Querying and Inference Application. Once the security alerts have been
stored in RDF using a MySQL database, it is possible to ask questions to the
ontology. This task allows to check how well the ontology can answer important
questions about security incidents. To perform this task, Jena and a specific
RDF querying language, SPARQL14 , have been used. SPARQL is a SQL-like15
language that uses the basic clause SELECT FROM WHERE.
    Using the querying and inference application, the security administrators can
ask questions like:

 – How many security incidents have happened because of such a vulnerability?
 – Which are the most common types of security incidents?
 – Which are the assets that have more security problems and must to receive
   more attention concerning patches?
 – Which security incidents have happened after a previous security incident
   (looking for correlation)?
 – Which are the most common ports used to perform a security incident?

     The following two examples show how a query is done using SPARQL.


     (i) Which security incidents happened on January 15, 2006?
Prefix ab: 
Select Distinct ?incident ?type
Where { ?x ab:has_date "2006-01-15";
ab:has_description ?incident;
ab:hassecurity_incident_type ?type} Order by ?x
14
   Recursively, SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language. http://www.w3.org/TR/
   rdf-sparql-query/.
15
   Structured Query Language.
    (ii) Which security incidents were caused by a malicious code?

Prefix ab: 
Select distinct ?incident ?date
Where { ?a ab:hassecurity_incident_type "Malicious Code";
ab:has_description ?incident;
ab:has_date ?date}


   The results of these queries allow the administrators to know which inci-
dents happened in a specific day and which incidents were caused by a malicious
code, respectivelly. If many incidents happen because of malicious codes, such
as viruses or worms, the administrators can update the computational systems
more frequently. Combining both queries, it is also possible to know in which
date security incidents caused by malicious codes happen. Using the results, the
administrators can prevent attacks that happen on specific periods.


6    Benefits of OntoSec in Information Security
     Management

We can point out the following advantages of using ontologies to assist the in-
formation security management:

 – The development of ontologies creates a conceptual model that makes it
   possible to the organization to know better its security incidents domain.
 – The ontologies can facilitate the interoperability among different security
   tools, creating a unique way to represent security data and, for instance, al-
   lowing that security alerts from any security tool is mapped into an ontology.
 – The Security Incident Ontology imports the Vulnerability Ontology, allowing
   the reuse of knowledge and information. Other ontologies about security
   domain could be imported, such as a Virus Ontology or a Worm Ontology.
   The same reuse can be scaled up in such a way that security information can
   be treated in a more abstract level.
 – The querying and inference process helps the security administrators to be
   more confident of the decisions made about the security information man-
   agement, because the ontology developed is knowledge bases about secu-
   rity incidents. The ontology allows the security administrators to learn from
   previous security problems, assisting them in solving and preventing new
   problems.


7    Final Remarks and Future Works

Not only ontologies can fundamentally change the way in which systems are
constructed, as stated by Swartout and Tate [26], but they also will change
the way people and systems can communicate to each other about a domain
knowledge.
    Using a security incident ontology, the organization can improve its ability to
manage and to control security incidents problems. Besides that, the administra-
tors can learn more about security and can prevent the computational systems
from previous problems efficiently.
    The mapping process shows that the ontology models important information
about security incidents. The querying and inference process helps the security
administrators to be more confident of the decisions made about the security
management, because OntoSec allows to create a knowledge base about secu-
rity incidents.
    The next steps of the validation process are: (i) to use real security incidents
(security incidents from the CSIRT/USP will be used), (ii) to map security alerts
from other security tools, and (iii) to develop a security incident management
system based on the ontology, making it easier the interoperability among dif-
ferent security tools.

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