SecOnto: Ontological Representation of Security Directives

Abstract

The current digital landscape demands robust security requirements and, for doing so, the institutions enact complex security directives to protect the citizens and the infrastructures, particularly in the European Union. These directives aim to safeguard data and harmonise security across the European region, and institutions must navigate this evolving legal landscape in order to implement and keep up-to-date the prescribed security measures.

However, understanding and implementing these directives towards full compliance can be difficult and expensive. Ontological representation can be employed to represent and operationalise such security directives, ultimately contributing to the effectiveness and efficiency of the compliance process. Ontologies in fact promote a structured approach to represent knowledge, making the applicable directives more simply understandable by humans and more readily processable by machines.

This article introduces SecOnto, a novel methodology for representing security directives as ontologies. SecOnto breaks down the process of transforming the juridical language of modern security directives into full-fledged ontologies by means of five semi-automated steps: Preprocessing, Interpretation, Structuring, Representation and Verification. Each step is described and validated by means of operational examples based upon Directive 2022/2555 of the European Parliament and of the Council of the European Union on security of network and information systems, better known as NIS 2.