Onto-CARMEN: Ontology-driven approach for Cyber-Physical System Security Requirements meta-modelling and reasoning

Abstract

In the last years, Cyber-physical systems (CPS) have at- tracted substantial mainstream, especially in the industrial sector, since they have become the focus of cyber-attacks. CPS are complex systems that encompass a great variety of hardware and software components with a countless number of configurations and features. For this reason, the construction, validation, and diagnosis of security in CPS become a major challenge. An invalid security requirement for the CPS can pro- duce partial or incomplete configuration, even misconfigurations, and hence catastrophic consequences. Therefore, it is crucial to ensure the val- idation of the security requirements specification from the earlier design stages. To this end, OntoCarmen is proposed, a semantic approach that enables the automatic verification and diagnosis of security requirements according to the ENISA and OWASP recommendations. Our approach provides a mechanism for the specification of security requirements on top of ontologies, and automatic diagnosis through semantic axioms and SPARQL rules. The approach has been validated using security require- ments from a real case study.