Re: [cti-stix] STIX COA Roadmap

[Allan Thomson <athomson@lookingglasscyber.com>]

There are many reasons why having intelligence and COA work together in a coordinated manner makes sense.

 

Whether that requires 1 spec or 2 specs in my opinion is focusing on the wrong issue right now.

 

We should be focused on solving the problems that tying intelligence and COA together solves. If we then need 2 specs to better organize and define that work it will be become obvious as part of the process.

 

I agree with Jyoti that we should spend some time discussing the COA/Intel topic at the F2F.

 

Allan

 

From: "cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org" <cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org> on behalf of "Jyoti Verma (jyoverma)" <jyoverma@cisco.com>
Date: Friday, September 22, 2017 at 12:42 PM
To: "Wunder, John" <jwunder@mitre.org>, "cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org" <cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org>
Subject: Re: [cti-stix] STIX COA Roadmap

 

Hi John,

 

I don’t know how to comment on this but from my point of view COA fits well within the STIX ecosystem. It ties the rich threat intelligence to response. If it were to become a separate spec, then soon we would be talking about a liaison between the two. I agree scope wise it is broad and that’s why we created the roadmap to span across releases. This would be an excellent topic of discussion during the F2F.

 

Thanks,

Jyoti

Technical Leader,

CTO office Security Business Group,

Cisco Systems Inc.

 

 

 

From: <cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org> on behalf of "Wunder, John A." <jwunder@mitre.org>
Date: Thursday, September 21, 2017 at 9:54 AM
To: "cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org" <cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org>
Subject: Re: [cti-stix] STIX COA Roadmap

 

I want to state my opinion carefully, because I feel like it would be easy to misinterpret it.

 

First, I think the direction these capabilities are going in makes sense. It provides a logical stepping stone from more basic stuff to more complicated stuff. I also think these capabilities are important tied to the STIX ecosystem.

 

Where I have concerns is that there is a lot of functionality described here. I can see it growing to be even longer than the Patterning document. It also is different in tone than the rest of STIX, which mostly describes a data model vs. functional capabilities (exception being patterning). Lastly, what’s described here for COA may be useful outside of the realm of threat intelligence (thinking vulnerability and configuration management in particular), so I think scope-wise it’s broader than STIX.

 

For all those reasons, I don’t think this should be treated as capabilities that are added directly to STIX. Instead, I think it should be published as a separate specification (work product) that we pull in to STIX and reference appropriately. We talked about at some point doing the same to Patterning, but because it was fairly lightweight we didn’t. If we were just talking Phase 1 here I would probably feel the same, but seeing where this is headed I think it’s better to preemptively assume that will be the case. If others agree w/ this approach we can figure out how organizationally to tackle it (assign editors, etc.)

 

John

 

From: <cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org> on behalf of "Jyoti Verma (jyoverma)" <jyoverma@cisco.com>
Date: Thursday, September 21, 2017 at 2:18 AM
To: "cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org" <cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org>
Subject: [cti-stix] STIX COA Roadmap

 

CTI TC,

 

The COA mini group has been meeting on a weekly basis since a couple of weeks and we’ve put together a roadmap for the goals/features that we would like to address across 3 STIX releases. The mini group gave a readout on the Sept 19^th working call and the slides we presented are here – https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1be_i8zcIlsmo_sStB8jeAp33sah-z7SgVGw_eRm1omc/edit?usp=sharing

 

In the first release, we would be solving the following 5 features for manual/automated COAs. For automated COAs, the group discussed using OpenC2 if the timelines align. More details on the complete roadmap and use cases can be found in the working draft here - https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zXV5WEmyLUbKiSpuHgywu5-LLrJVd91d7OP3nQBB7qM/edit#.

 

 

Feature	Description	Example
Preventative Static COAs	Literal COAs tied to indicator or other objects. No need to wait for anything to fire.	SANS Top 20 controls or blacklist domains
Mitigative or Remediative Static COAs	All information to take the action is statically configured and known a-priori.	Block evildomain.com Deny traffic to and from 10.0.0.1 Delete Registry key
Accommodating multiple actions	Single COA representing multiple steps	Cleaning up malware from Windows Desktop - safe mode, kill process, delete key, delete file, etc.
Basic Sequencing	The order in which COAs should be executed	1->2->3->4
Allow parallel processing	Allow the actions to define if they can be done in parallel or if they need to be done one at a time	1->2 3->4

 

If there are objections to this list, please let us know within 14 days. You can send your comments by replying to this email or in the COA channel on Slack.

 

Thanks,

STIX COA mini group