Ontology-based Solution for Handling Safety and Cybersecurity Interdependency in NFV Safety Architecture
Dionysia Varvarigou, David Espès, Giacomo Bersano · Procedia Computer Science · 2023
For safety-critical systems based on Network Function Virtualization (NFV) technology both safety and cybersecurity need to be taken into account. In case these systems face an anomaly (either intentional or not), they can have an impact on humans and environment. Thus, it is understood that safety and cybersecurity affect each other and so they need to be considered as interdependent. For this reason, an ontology-based solution for safety is needed, through which it is possible to handle the safety and cybersecurity interdependency since ontologies describe the whole knowledge of a domain. Thus, we propose a new safety ontology for NFV framework which is able to cover reliability, availability, maintainability, and integrity-related breakdown types. This is because these properties interact and influence safety according to ENISA. Our ontology allows us to have a uniformized representation of the potential anomalies that a system and its elements can face. Based on this representation, it is also possible to have a decision-making process to avoid potential conflicts between safety and cybersecurity, in order to best handle their interdependency. According to the results of our implementation, it is shown that our ontology handles the safety and cybersecurity interdependency, and has little impact on decision-making time, which makes it an effective methodology for NFV framework.