Re: [cti-stix] Including Incident and Assets in STIX MVP

Gary,

Based on your comments below, I added an open question to the Observations TLO in regards to adding the kill chain phases CV to it. It seems like that is something you need. Please advise.

Bret

From: cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org <cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org> on behalf of Katz, Gary CTR DC3/DCCI <Gary.Katz.ctr@dc3.mil>
Sent: Friday, June 10, 2016 2:49 PM
To: 'Piazza, Rich'; Allan Thomson; cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: RE: [cti-stix] Including Incident and Assets in STIX MVP

Our organization receives incident information as the primary type of information that is sent as part of the sharing initiative that we run. Incidents provide the context associated with a observations. A SOC can easily communicate everything that happens within an Incident. That information is placed in observations and are associated with kill chain phases. The incident ties all of this together. Either a SOC or a cyber analytics team can take that information and create indicators based upon the observations associated with the incident. The incident data can be useful for trending, determining TTPs or volatility. It's very useful for performing attribution back to an intrusion set or threat actor. We wouldn't want to tie Observations directly back to an Intrusion Set or Campaign, we want to tie back an Incident. If I have 10 observations directly tied to a Campaign its difficult to know if they were part of the same incident, were they separate observations of just different parts of the campaign.

-Gary

-----Original Message-----
From: cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org [mailto:cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org] On Behalf Of Piazza, Rich
Sent: Friday, June 10, 2016 3:59 PM
To: Allan Thomson; cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: [Non-DoD Source] RE: [cti-stix] Including Incident and Assets in STIX MVP

Hi Allan,

Can you be more specific when you say “overlap with other TLOs“?

I assume you are thinking mostly of campaigns and intrusion sets. I would say that campaigns are different because they might contain several incidents, that you have tied together as a campaign (maybe associated with some threat actor). I would think intrusion sets are similar to incidents, but they don’t contain information about what happened “after” the intrusion happened – what was done to mitigate the attack, for instance. Intrusion sets are more amorphous…at least the way I understand them.

But I agree – we need a well-defined use case that needs to be supported for Incident’s inclusion in the MVP. I once again leave that to others, as my knowledge is more limited to a STIX-centric point of view (except for VERIS J ).

                Rich

From: cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org [mailto:cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org] On Behalf Of Allan Thomson
Sent: Friday, June 10, 2016 2:42 PM
To: Piazza, Rich <rpiazza@mitre.org>; cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: Re: [cti-stix] Including Incident and Assets in STIX MVP

Hi Rich – As I said, if there is a use case and people are willing to put in the work to add this content, review it, resolve all comments by July then cool.

But we should do that if there are people planning to implement it in their respective orgs or products as part of MVP.

Otherwise we are just adding bloat to the MVP spec that people will ignore.

Regarding your proposal it seems to me that several of the attributes and relationships overlap with other TLOs so its not immediately obvious to me when I would create an incident vs other TLOs and the benefit to having another object that contains a lot of similar attributes/relationships to others.

allan

From: "Piazza, Rich" <rpiazza@mitre.org>
Date: Friday, June 10, 2016 at 11:30 AM
To: Allan Thomson <athomson@lookingglasscyber.com>, "cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org" <cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org>
Subject: RE: [cti-stix] Including Incident and Assets in STIX MVP

There have been so many votes about what should be in MVP, so I’m not sure which one you are referring to, but it you look in the STIX cover page (in google docs: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1yvqWaPPnPW-2NiVCLqzRszcx91ffMowfT5MmE9Nsy_w/edit#heading=h.ye30tgaxelp4 <https://docs.google.com/document/d/1yvqWaPPnPW-2NiVCLqzRszcx91ffMowfT5MmE9Nsy_w/edit#heading=h.ye30tgaxelp4> ), it seems like the vote was in favor of “Incident Basics” and “Asset Stub”. Were you referring to another vote??

My email was an attempt to decide what “Basics” and “Stub” mean J

The whole purpose of VERIS is to describe incidents. I think if we released STIX 2.0 without having such a concept many would be surprised.

I will leave it to others to defend this more vociferously…

From: Allan Thomson [mailto:athomson@lookingglasscyber.com]
Sent: Friday, June 10, 2016 2:21 PM
To: Piazza, Rich <rpiazza@mitre.org>; cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: Re: [cti-stix] Including Incident and Assets in STIX MVP

Hi Rich - Did we not review the list of objects and vote on what was required for MVP? Should we not be focusing on that MVP list before we start introducing more objects or classes? Given that its already June 10th and the goal is to have a MVP spec by July it would seem we need to focus and put some of these items on the backlog for a future release.

Regarding the statement on STIX 2.0 without an incident object.

How many organizations are sharing incidents? Vs sharing campaigns, TTPs, intrusion sets, indicators….etc?

What does an incident convey that the other TLOs do not?

If there’s a strong case for incident and asset in MVP then we should add them for sure. But I’m not sure there is.

Allan

From: "cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org" <cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org> on behalf of "Piazza, Rich" <rpiazza@mitre.org>
Date: Friday, June 10, 2016 at 7:43 AM
To: "cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org" <cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org>
Subject: [cti-stix] Including Incident and Assets in STIX MVP

It is difficult to imagine STIX 2.0 without an Incident TLO and if we include Incident, that implies that we also need an Asset TLO. Before I present a proposal for these two TLOs, I thought I might describe how these concepts are defined in STIX 1.x and how that fits into our current design goals for STIX 2.0. Both of these objects in STIX 1.x were very “meaty”. I have some comments and questions below. Knowing the community’s thoughts on them could help me come up with a better initial proposal.

Also, a lot of the features were based on VERIS. I wrote a stix2veris converter a few years ago, therefore, I’m aware of the similarities and differences between STIX 1.2 and VERIS.

For STIX 1.x documentation, see http://stixproject.github.io/data-model/1.2/incident/IncidentType/ <http://stixproject.github.io/data-model/1.2/incident/IncidentType/> and http://stixproject.github.io/data-model/1.2/incident/AffectedAssetType/ <http://stixproject.github.io/data-model/1.2/incident/AffectedAssetType/>

The Incident object in STIX 1.x can be summarized into five groupings of fields (fields in italics are already not part of STIX 2.0):

Basic:

ID, Title, Description, Short_Description, Handling, Information_Source, External_ID, etc.

Metadata:

Time, Status (cv), Discovery Method (cv from VERIS), Categories, Confidence, Security_Compromise (cv)

Relationships:

Related_Indicators, Related_Observables, Leveraged_TTPs, Attributed_Threat_Actors, COA_Requested, COA_Taken, Related_Incidents, Affected_Assets, Related_Packages

Details:

Impact_Assessment, Intended_Effect, History

Associated Identities:

Reporter, Responder, Coordinator, Victim, Contact

Comments and Questions?

·         Most of the Basic fields are similar to the TLO Common fields in 2.0.

·         Categories is very similar is similar to Indicator_Type (or labels in 2.0) in that it is currently a cv (http://stixproject.github.io/data-model/1.2/stixVocabs/IncidentCategoryVocab-1.0/) , but its list of values seems somewhat incomplete. It should probably be an ov in 2.0.

·         Relationships are called out for many of the TLOs, which are appropriate to make explicit?

·         History is a log of actions taken, either as COA or just text notes. Is this MVP?

·         Intended_Effect, Impact_Assessment – similar to objective field of campaign, which we are representing as a list of strings in 2.0.

·         Victim is probably the identity of the actual victim, not a description of a “general” target.

·         Reporter could be related to created_by_ref, although the concepts might not totally align.

·         Are Responder, Coordinator and Contact needed for MVP?

·         Anything missing that we need for 2.0?

The Asset object in STIX 1.x can be summarized into three groupings of fields (fields in italics are already not part of STIX 2.0):

Basic:

Description

Metadata:

Type (cv from VERIS - http://stixproject.github.io/data-model/1.2/stixVocabs/AssetTypeVocab-1.0/ <http://stixproject.github.io/data-model/1.2/stixVocabs/AssetTypeVocab-1.0/> ), Ownership_Class (cv from VERIS), Management_Class (cv from VERIS), Location_Class (cv from VERIS), Location

Details:

Structured_Description, Nature_Of_Security_Effects, Business_Function_Or_Role

Comments and Questions?

·         Type seems to be very important here – and the list of values from VERIS is very complete.

·         Are the fields Type and Description sufficient for MVP?

·         Structured_Description via CybOX is what is specified in STIX 1.x. There might be other standards that we eventually want to reference, but that is not something for 2.0.

·         Are Ownership_Class, Management_Class, Location_Class part of MVP?

·         Is the Location of the asset something that needs to be specified explicitly in its own field?

·         Nature_Of_Security_Effects is where CIA (Confidentiality, Integrity, Availability, etc) is specified. These concepts are commonly used to describe cyber-attack activity. These are important concepts in VERIS also. MVP?

·         Anything missing that we need for 2.0?

Thanks for reading this long email…. J

                Rich

Rich Piazza

The MITRE Corporation

781-271-3760

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