Ontology and life cycle of knowledge for ICS security assessments

Abstract

Industrial Control Systems (ICS) succumb to an ever evolving variety of threats. Additionally, threats are increasing in number and get more complex. This requires a holistic and up-to-date security concept for ICS as a whole. Usually security concepts are applied and updated based on regularly performed ICS security assessments. Such ICS security assessments require high effort and extensive knowledge about ICS and its security. This is often a problem for small and mediumsized enterprises (SME), which do not have sufficient respective sufficiently skilled human resources. This paper defines in a first step requirements on the knowledge needed to perform an ICS security assessment and the life cycle of this knowledge. Afterwards the ICS security knowledge and its life cycle are developed and discussed considering the requirements and related work.