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The SEPSES Knowledge Graph: An Integrated Resource for Cybersecurity

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The Semantic Web – ISWC 2019 (ISWC 2019)

Abstract

This paper introduces an evolving cybersecurity knowledge graph that integrates and links critical information on real-world vulnerabilities, weaknesses and attack patterns from various publicly available sources. Cybersecurity constitutes a particularly interesting domain for the development of a domain-specific public knowledge graph, particularly due to its highly dynamic landscape characterized by time-critical, dispersed, and heterogeneous information. To build and continually maintain a knowledge graph, we provide and describe an integrated set of resources, including vocabularies derived from well-established standards in the cybersecurity domain, an ETL workflow that updates the knowledge graph as new information becomes available, and a set of services that provide integrated access through multiple interfaces. The resulting semantic resource offers comprehensive and integrated up-to-date instance information to security researchers and professionals alike. Furthermore, it can be easily linked to locally available information, as we demonstrate by means of two use cases in the context of vulnerability assessment and intrusion detection.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://www.mitre.org.

  2. 2.

    https://nist.gov.

  3. 3.

    Available at https://w3id.org/sepses/cyber-kg.

  4. 4.

    Semantic Processing of Security Event Streams is an ongoing research project.

  5. 5.

    36,594,388 triples as of July 2, 2019.

  6. 6.

    https://sepses.ifs.tuwien.ac.at.

  7. 7.

    https://www.mitre.org.

  8. 8.

    For a review of standards for the exchange of security information, cf. [1].

  9. 9.

    https://cve.mitre.org.

  10. 10.

    https://capec.mitre.org.

  11. 11.

    https://cwe.mitre.org.

  12. 12.

    https://cpe.mitre.org.

  13. 13.

    https://www.first.org/cvss/.

  14. 14.

    https://github.com/stucco.

  15. 15.

    https://oasis-open.github.io/cti-documentation/.

  16. 16.

    https://attack.mitre.org.

  17. 17.

    https://github.com/Ebiquity/Unified-Cybersecurity-Ontology.

  18. 18.

    https://github.com/daedafusion/cyber-ontology.

  19. 19.

    Most commonly as XML or JSON files.

  20. 20.

    The figure omits detailed concepts for the sake of clarity. The complete vocabularies can be found at https://github.com/sepses/vocab.

  21. 21.

    https://www.first.org/cvss/specification-document.

  22. 22.

    cf. https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/data-feeds.

  23. 23.

    https://github.com/carml/carml.

  24. 24.

    https://jena.apache.org.

  25. 25.

    In some cases, this reduced processing time from appr. an hour to less than a minute.

  26. 26.

    https://w3id.org/sepses.

  27. 27.

    e.g., https://w3id.org/sepses/resource/cve/CVE-2014-0160.

  28. 28.

    https://w3id.org/sepses/sparql.

  29. 29.

    https://ldf-server.sepses.ifs.tuwien.ac.at.

  30. 30.

    https://w3id.org/sepses/dumps/.

  31. 31.

    https://github.com/sepses/cyber-kg-converter.

  32. 32.

    https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT.

  33. 33.

    The original raw data are published by MITRE with a no-charge copyright license and by NVD without copyright.

  34. 34.

    Prefixes identical to Listing 1.

  35. 35.

    e.g., https://w3id.org/sepses/resource/cve/CVE-2016-1646.

  36. 36.

    https://www.snort.org.

  37. 37.

    https://www.snort.org/downloads.

  38. 38.

    https://w3id.org/sepses/vocab/rule/snort.

  39. 39.

    https://maccdc.org/2012-agenda/, source: https://www.secrepo.com.

  40. 40.

    https://w3id.org/sepses/vocab/log/snort-alert.

  41. 41.

    Prefixes from Listing 1 are reused.

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Acknowledgments

This work has been supported by netidee SCIENCE, the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) under grant P30437-N31, and the Christian Doppler Research Association. The competence center SBA Research (SBA-K1) is funded within the framework of COMET—Competence Centers for Excellent Technologies by BMVIT, BMDW, and the federal state of Vienna, managed by the FFG.

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Correspondence to Elmar Kiesling .

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Kiesling, E., Ekelhart, A., Kurniawan, K., Ekaputra, F. (2019). The SEPSES Knowledge Graph: An Integrated Resource for Cybersecurity. In: Ghidini, C., et al. The Semantic Web – ISWC 2019. ISWC 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11779. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30796-7_13

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30796-7_13

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