Challenges of Web-Based Information Security Knowledge Sharing

Nowadays information systems play a vital role for organizations and individuals, which is why their protection is becoming increasingly important. Often, solutions are developed for very similar problems over and over again. An exchange of knowledge between experts would be desirable in order to prevent developing always the same solutions by independent persons. Such an exchange could also lead to solutions of higher quality, as existing approaches could be advanced, instead of always reinventing the security wheel. This paper examines how machine-readable information security knowledge can be shared between different organizations on the basis of a web portal utilizing Web-Protege. It can be shown that through the use of ontologies the domain of information security can be modeled and stored in a human and a machine-readable format, enabling both human editing and automation (e.g. for risk calculations). The evaluation of the web portal has shown that the most important challenge a tool for knowledge sharing has to face is the aspect of motivating users to participate in a knowledge exchange.