Web of cybersecurity: Linking, locating, and discovering structured cybersecurity information

Cybersecurity is one of the main concerns of many organizations today, and accessibility to cybersecurity information in a timely manner is crucial to maintaining cybersecurity. Various repositories of cybersecurity‐related information are publicly available on the Internet. However, users are unaware of many of them, and it is impractical for them to keep track of all of them. Cybersecurity information stored in these repositories must be able to be located and accessed by the parties who need it. To address this issue, this paper proposes a mechanism of linking, locating, and discovering various cybersecurity information to improve its accessibility in a timely manner. This mechanism allows us to locate various cybersecurity information having different schemata by generating metadata with which a list of cybersecurity information is managed. The information structure incorporated in this mechanism is unique, and it makes our mechanism flexible and extensible. The structure consists of categories and formats that are linked to each other. The mechanism can propagate information updates to minimize the risk of obsolete information. This paper also introduces a prototype of the mechanism to demonstrate its feasibility, and it analyzes the mechanism's extensibility, scalability, and information credibility. Through this study, we aim to improve the accessibility of cybersecurity information on the Internet and facilitate information sharing beyond organizational borders, with the eventual goal of creating a web of cybersecurity.