An Ontology to Promote Interoperability between Cyber-physical Security Systems in Critical Infrastructures

Critical infrastructures, like airports and hospitals, provide essential services and are considered huge investments in any country. Ensuring the security of these critical infrastructures is a necessity in every possible aspect. These infrastructures, however, currently make use of different technological solutions with distinct security levels, features and knowledge representation formats which often do not communicate directly with each other, leaving the task of processing the global view of the institution's security to the end-users. In order to have a complete view of the current cybersecurity status of a given system, interoperability between these tools must be addressed. Different ontologies have been proposed to deal with subdomains of cybersecurity. Similarly, these fail to provide a full view of cyber and physical security that would be necessary to achieve a global security approach. In this paper, we explore the current status and activities of cybersecurity as a basis for the development process, propose an integrated ontology for combined cyber and physical security. After that, we suggest several evaluation methods to be applied to the resulting ontology in order to check its usefulness in achieving the interoperability goal. The focus will be on the different systems needed for an integrated security of airports.