Attack Taxonomies and Ontologies

In the past few years network security threats have increased significantly. Methods for attacks have not only grown in diversity but also became more sophisticated. The increased need for security mechanisms and countermeasures requires a comprehensive understanding of those attacks and their characteristics. To organize the knowledge of attacks a large variety of classifications were proposed in form of taxonomies and ontologies. The development of these classifications has emerged as an effective means for developing awareness systems and creating common descriptive languages. However, due to the high diversity of attacks no standard classification of network attacks exists so far. In this paper, a survey of existing attack taxonomies and ontologies is presented to create an overview of conducted work in this field of research. Furthermore, issues and drawbacks are discussed in a comparative analysis. The conducted survey has shown the need of a flexible, standardized classification of attacks and vulnerabilities to enable efficient knowledge sharing among the scientific community.