Towards an Ontology for IoT Context-Based Security Evaluation

(From the abstract)
As a consequence of the massive adoption of IoT technologies in a wide spectrum of applications, from Smart Cities to Smart Agriculture, security has become a great concern. Many different technologies and devices, often constrained by energy consumption, size or price, make for a complex and difficult scene. Added to that, a broad range of data consumers and agents interacting with those systems have different requirements and expectations regarding security and privacy, while existing approaches at evaluating security do not account for that diversity of security and privacy expectations.

Ontologies have proven to be a a good way to represent knowledge in a way that embraces the distributed nature of IoT, as well as the capability of being machine-friendly. On top of that, previous works have been already established a foundation on the representation of those security elements and traits in several scenarios, including IoT, establishing the grounds for this work. In this paper we present an Ontology for IoT Context-Based Security Evaluation (IoTSecEv), developed following the NeOn methodology, performing a conceptual formalization of the observer’s context on security preferences, and linking this knowledge to concepts of an existing ontology on IoT Security: IoTSec.