Conceptual Characterization of Cybersecurity Ontologies

Cybersecurity is known as the practice of protecting systems from digital attacks. Organizations are seeking efficient solutions for the management and protection of their assets. It is a complex issue, especially for great enterprises, because it requires an interdisciplinary approach. The kinds of problems enterprises must deal with and this domain complexity induces misinterpretations and misunderstandings about the concepts and relations in question. This article focus on dealing with Cybersecurity from an ontological perspective. The first contribution is a search of previously existing works that have defined Cybersecurity Ontologies. The paper describes the process to search these works. The second contribution of the paper is the definition of characteristics to classify the papers of Cybersecurity Ontologies previously found. This classification aims to compare the previous works with the same criteria. The third contribution of the paper is the analysis of the results of the comparison of previous works in the field of Cybersecurity Ontologies. Moreover, the paper discusses the gaps found and proposes good practice actions in Ontology Engineering for this domain. The article ends with some next steps proposed in the evolution towards a pragmatic and iterative solution that meets the needs of organizations.