Research Article

An Enhanced Method for Web Ontologies Encryption

Redouane Nejjahi
Hassan 1st University, Marocco
* Corresponding author
Abderrahim Marzouk
IR2M Laboratory, Hassan 1st University, Marocco
Noreddine Gherabi
Department of Computer Science, National School of Applied Sciences, Marocco.
DOI icon 10.24018/ejece.2019.3.4.99

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Submitted 2019-06-24
Published 2019-07-13

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Table of Contents

Article Main Content

Ontologies are used in almost any domain; they have been used both in the public and private domains. In the latter case, we will face security problems, where encryption may be a solution. In this case, one can encrypt their ontology file with any encryption standard, delete the original file and store the encrypted one. When exploiting the ontology, the user should decrypt the encrypted file on the fly and make the needed reasoning. In this paper, we introduce an enhanced method for encrypting web ontologies. This method consists of maintaining the ontology structure (schema) while encrypting only the ontology data. We found that the enhanced method is at least ten times faster than the basic method. With such results, we believe that existing tools for querying or making reasoning on ontologies can be rewritten to take advantage of this method in the case of ontology security.

Keywords: Ontology; Cryptography; OWL; AES; Semantic Web; Security

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