Defensio Abdelkader Shaaban

28.07.2021 11:00

„An Ontology-Based Cybersecurity Framework for the Automotive Domain - Design, Implementation, and Evaluation“

In view of the UNECE regulation for the approval of road vehicles, car manufacturers will have to ensure that their vehicles are cyber-secure. The increase of connected units in vehicles leads to a significant increase in attack surfaces, increasing the rate of potential security incidents. Therefore, security requirements verification and validation is a significant part of the development phase in current and future vehicles. We can only develop a secure vehicle if we define the existing security vulnerabilities that could be exploited by different potential threats and accurately select the relevant security requirements to address these security issues. This work introduces an ontology-based security management framework for the automotive domain. The framework aims to check the correctness of the applied security requirements within the vehicular design by applying a series of logical inference rules to ensure that the security requirements are fulfilled. Sequences of procedures are applied for each vehicular component/asset individually to verify and validate the correctness of the selected security requirements. Additionally, it intends to manage the existing security gaps identified by the verification and validation process by suggesting a suitable set of security requirements that could be integrated within the vehicular design to protect the assets and the components within the vehicular network different forms of cyberattacks. The framework is developed to be fully-adaptable for handling different forms of ontology inputs representing the relationships of the vehicular elements with existing security issues and the applied security requirements. This gives more flexibility to perform security requirements testing and manage the existing security issues in different forms. Four experiments are applied to a real case study in the automotive domain to examine the effectiveness of the proposed framework and demonstrate that the proposed security framework is adaptable to handle multiple input varieties. The outcomes prove that the framework is effective for saving time, effort, and reducing human mistakes. In addition, the framework provides a mapping strategy between different security requirements and the components/assets with their security vulnerabilities to focus on the applicable security requirements for addressing security issues. These requirements are considered a set of suggested or recommended security requirements, which assist in selecting and finding the most appropriate security requirements to fulfil security gaps in the vehicular design. This framework is suggested for the automotive sector. It could also be used and integrated within the development lifecycle of other relevant application domains such as in Cyber-Physical Systems and Internet-of-Things, in cases where the complete data are available. This will be discussed in further detail within this thesis context.

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