Building an ontology of cyber security

Situation awareness depends on a reliable perception of the environment and comprehension of its semantic structures. In this respect, cyberspace presents a unique challenge to the situation awareness of users and analysts, since it is a unique combination of human and machine elements, whose complex interactions occur in a global communication network. Accordingly, we outline the underpinnings of an ontology of secure operations in cyberspace, presenting the ontology framework and providing two modeling examples. We make the case for adopting a rigorous semantic model of cyber security to overcome the current limits of the state of the art.