An Ontology Based Model for Cyber Security Awareness Education

Abstract

The internet has become a crucial part of our everyday lives so it is important to ensure that one is secure when surfing on it since personal information can be exchanged. Cyber security awareness is the key to internet security. The research discussed in this paper aims to develop an ontology model for cyber security awareness for educational purposes, to enable users to take responsibility for their own safety online. It aims to fill a gap in understanding of the cyber security awareness (CSA) education and to bridge the consensus gap between the Body of Knowledge (BoK) contributors. The research study was conducted using CURONTO (which is a curriculum ontology) model, to develop our CSA education ontology model that we propose. There are many attempts being made to allow for CSA education, but there remains a challenge of lack of consensus or common understanding of the CSA body of knowledge. There is need for a common model and format aimed at bringing together and putting in place, measures to address cybersecurity attacks. This will assist organizations and countries to close the gap and difference in the available CSA information globally, and to especially assist countries and organizations that are still developing cybersecurity protection measures, to have the information that they need readily available (Takahashi, Kadobayashi, 2011). We used an ontology because it will also be available to the academic community also to refine, extend or apply to other domains and also an ontology is both sharable and interoperable. In this paper we used the CURONTO model to develop our CSA ontology model for educational purposes, we expanded the one class of the model called syllabus and we added more classes so that it can serve for the CSA education. Then we did a literature study to develop a CSA syllabus from, the acquired syllabus was then represented in the model.