Atomic Security Concerns: Towards a Foundational Language for Security Knowledge Representation

Abstract

Cybersecurity governance, risk management, compliance, and security architecture rely on numerous concepts, including security properties, domains, controls, risks, implementation measures, capabilities, and compliance requirements. Although these concepts are widely used, they are often represented through heterogeneous abstractions and vocabularies, making relationships among them difficult to express consistently and leaving much of the associated reasoning dependent on expert knowledge. This paper introduces the concepts of Security Concerns and Atomic Security Concerns (ASCs) and explores the hypothesis that cybersecurity knowledge may be represented through a finite set of foundational concerns. Inspired by the role of atoms in chemistry, the proposed approach views cybersecurity concepts as compositions of more fundamental concerns rather than as independent abstractions. Hence, Atomic Security Concerns could be viewed as a common abstraction layer for the representation of cybersecurity concepts, independently of their domain, nature, or level of granularity. Building upon this perspective, the paper explores how Atomic Security Concerns may provide the vocabulary of a cybersecurity language and how cybersecurity concepts may be represented as concern sets supporting explicit relationships among concepts. The contribution of this work is intentionally conceptual: it introduces a framework and research hypothesis for investigating the foundations of a common language for cybersecurity knowledge representation, reasoning, and future formalization.