Ontology-Based Solution for Handling Safety and Cybersecurity Interdependency in Safety-Critical Systems

Abstract

In case, safety-critical systems face an anomaly (either intentional or not), safety and cybersecurity impact humans and environment. Thus, they affect each other and so they are considered as interdependent. An ontology-based solution for safety is needed to handle this interdependency. We propose a new safety ontology for Network Function Virtualization (NFV) framework which is able to cover reliability, availability, maintainability, and integrity-related breakdown types, since they 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, a decision-making process takes place to avoid potential conflicts between safety and cybersecurity in order to best handle their interdependency. The results of our implementation show 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.