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Subject: RE: [cti] Database Subcommittee / conceptual/logical model subcommittee


Terry,

It should certainly be clear what group has essential responsibility for a given scope of Cyber threat concepts, that this same group should be bound to the XML representation issues may not be the best idea as substantial tradeoffs are made in the process which may not be relevant to stakeholder understanding, other technologies or other uses such as a DBMS. This is Classic “”separation of concerns”.

 

If the STIX/TAXI/Cybox subcommittees are the “concept owners” and that subdivision makes sense then I would suggest that in Phase-2 their deliverable should be the conceptual or logical models and then some other group can worry about optimizing for XML or any other chosen data format. As the approach and lifecycle are considered for phase 2, the structure of the subcommittees may deserve some reconsideration to better support that approach.

 

-Cory

 

From: cti@lists.oasis-open.org [mailto:cti@lists.oasis-open.org] On Behalf Of Terry MacDonald
Sent: Wednesday, June 24, 2015 4:45 PM
To: Jerome Athias
Cc: Jordan, Bret; Sean D. Barnum; Jane Ginn - jg@ctin.us; Cory Casanave; Eric.Burger@georgetown.edu; cti@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: Re: [cti] Database Subcommittee / conceptual/logical model subcommittee

 

I would also have to agree with Sean and Jerome on this point. Development of the models (language specific design or conceptual) should stay within each of the STIX/TAXI/CybOX subcommittees. The implementation and tooling could potentially be split of into the previously suggested 'implementation' subcommittee but that is something else to discuss :).

 

There is potential merit in agreeing some 'design goals' at a TC level for all models that are developed by SCs. This would ensure that only models meeting the TC agreed goals would be considered for approval?


Cheers


Terry MacDonald | STIX, TAXII, CybOX Consultant

 

M: +61-407-203-026

 

 

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed within this email do not represent the sentiment of any other party except my own. My views do not necessarily reflect those of my employers.

 

On 25 June 2015 at 04:59, Jerome Athias <athiasjerome@gmail.com> wrote:

I do understand Bret's concerns/warning, however I would agree with
Sean for now that we could avoid complexity by not having another SC,
at least for now.
As I see CybOX, STIX (and MAEC, and other things out of CTI scope) we
would need continuing to avoid butterfly effects, meaning that for
sure, some folks will continue to keep their eyes open (like Sauron)
on all the specific SCs. What will, imho, be also needed for potential
parallel abstract semantics or for database design efforts.


2015-06-24 21:36 GMT+03:00 Jordan, Bret <bret.jordan@bluecoat.com>:
> To this point I disagree, but then my disagreement also depends.  It depends
> on the leadership of the subcommittees.  If the leadership has both the time
> and energy to direct all aspects and drive the work to completion, then I
> would agree with you.  My experience, however, is that most leaders of
> subcommittees are somewhat myopic and do not have ample time or energy to
> invest in various simultaneous work products. Further, most leaders tend to
> be somewhat stifling of new work product ideas that fall outside of a SC
> charter or are viewed as a tangent.  Thus having people dedicated to an
> effort, that want to work on the effort, is very valuable.  The three golden
> rules are:
>
> 1) Do they want to do the work
> 2) Do they have the means, capacity, desire, skills to do the work
> 3) Can you tolerate them while the do the work
>
> The database design work needs to be done if we want real adoption.  And if
> the proposed leaders of the STIX and CYBOX SCs can drive it to completion at
> the same time as driving the top level objectives for the specification of
> the languages, then lets keep them together.  If the leaders view this as a
> side project, or something that is less important or something they do not
> have time to address, then it NEEDS to be split out in to its own SC.
>
>
> Thanks,
>
> Bret
>
>
>
> Bret Jordan CISSP
> Director of Security Architecture and Standards | Office of the CTO
> Blue Coat Systems
> PGP Fingerprint: 62A6 5999 0F7D 0D61 4C66 D59C 2DB5 111D 63BC A303
> "Without cryptography vihv vivc ce xhrnrw, however, the only thing that can
> not be unscrambled is an egg."
>
> On Jun 24, 2015, at 12:13, Barnum, Sean D. <sbarnum@mitre.org> wrote:
>
> My personal opinion would be that there should not be separate subcommittees
> for abstract semantics or for database design necessarily.
> These seem like any particular guidance or other results would need to be
> specific to a given language (STIX or CybOX) rather than just general and as
> such would best be handled as work items within each language SC.
>
> To me, as a general rule, more SCs will lead to more complexity in
> communication & coordination and far greater risk of overlap and conflict
> between SCs. Let’s create them where they are necessary to a specific scope
> of work that does not conflict with the scope of existing SCs.
>
> sean
>
> From: "Jane Ginn - jg@ctin.us" <jg@ctin.us>
> Date: Wednesday, June 24, 2015 at 2:05 PM
> To: "Barnum, Sean D." <sbarnum@mitre.org>, Jerome Athias
> <athiasjerome@gmail.com>, "cory-c@modeldriven.com" <cory-c@modeldriven.com>
> Cc: "Eric.Burger@georgetown.edu" <Eric.Burger@georgetown.edu>,
> "cti@lists.oasis-open.org" <cti@lists.oasis-open.org>
> Subject: Re: [cti] Database Subcommittee / conceptual/logical model
> subcommittee
>
> All:
> Building on Cory's suggestion... Jerome's observations... and Sean's note
> about using OWL or RDFS....
> Would it make sense to establish a Sub-Committee that combines some of the
> issues associated with database design that have been discussed previously
> (RDBMS vs. NoSQL) with this need for clarification at the abstract level
> (conceptual & logical)?
> If so.... would the scope of such a Sub-Committee also cover implementation
> and tooling issues as was earlier suggested by Patrick?
> Further, what would be the tangible outputs, and how would they map to the
> STIX/TAXII/ & CYBOX Sub-Committees?
> Jane Ginn, MSIA, MRP
> Cyber Threat Intelligence Network, Inc.
> jg@ctin.us
>
>
> -------- Original Message --------
> From: "Barnum, Sean D." <sbarnum@mitre.org>
> Sent: Wednesday, June 24, 2015 10:41 AM
> To: Jerome Athias <athiasjerome@gmail.com>,Cory Casanave
> <cory-c@modeldriven.com>
> Subject: Re: [cti] Database Subcommittee / conceptual/logical model
> subcommittee
> CC: Eric Burger <Eric.Burger@georgetown.edu>,"cti@lists.oasis-open.org "
> <cti@lists.oasis-open.org>
>
> I just wanted to add a note of clarification here for the intent/scope of
> STIX and CybOX to date.
> STIX and CybOX are intended to be Languages for expressing cyber threat
> information and cyber observable information respectively.
> As such, they are more than simple data models or schemas. They also involve
> the conceptual model for their scope.
> To date, the emergent and exploratory nature of this community seeking not
> only to formalize expressive representations for cyber threat information
> but to work collaboratively and iteratively to even figure out what that
> meant led to some necessary choices to work from the bottom up.
>
> This is why the language has initially been developed, refined and defined
> in the form of XML schema. The schematic level of abstraction gave us
> something concrete to discuss, model specific technical details and to
> experiment with real world data and implementations in order to iterate and
> improve. XML schema was chosen not because it is some magical answer that
> everyone everywhere should use but rather because it is ubiquitous,
> supported by a mature body of tooling and synergistic standards (XPATH,
> Xpointer, Xquery, etc.) and provides a powerful formal schema language to
> explicitly constrain syntax while enabling necessary flexibility. All of
> these things were needed to model and evolve a representation of an emergent
> knowledge space among a very diverse set of players.
>
> This approach served us well to successfully get us where we are today but
> it has always been recognized that specifying the language at this level of
> abstraction has significant downsides. First, it is difficult to define
> semantics and high level concepts effectively at this level and choosing any
> particular technical implementation (XML, JSON, etc.) inherently introduces
> technology-specific characteristics that really are not part of the more
> generalized language.
>
> In recognition of this, it has always been the plan to move the
> specification of the languages to a more general form once an appropriate
> level of maturity and stability had been reached (very similar to the plan
> to move to a formal standards body at the appropriate time). The first steps
> toward this were put into motion several months back when work began on an
> implementation independent specification for STIX and a separate but related
> one for CybOX. It was decided that based on community needs and maturity the
> appropriate first step in generalization would be to capture language
> structure and syntax in the form of a UML model that would be accompanied by
> a set of textual specifications to explain and characterize the UML model in
> a more human consumable form. The draft set of these specifications for STIX
> 1.1.1 are currently available in the STIXProject on github and the updated
> versions to STIX 1.2 should be completed within the next couple weeks. This
> will be the primary normative contribution to the CTI TC. There is a UML
> model for CybOX also available but the set of accompanying full textual
> specs similar to STIX will not be created before transition to the CTI TC so
> that work will likely fall to the CybOX SC.
>
> While UML models are formal and are abstracted from particular syntactic
> implementations (XML, JSON, etc.), they are not in all honesty really built
> to convey high-level conceptual models or explicit semantics of knowledge.
> They can be somewhat twisted to serve this purpose (as we have done in the
> implementation independent specs) but the fact that they were designed to
> serve a systems engineering rather than knowledge engineering purpose leads
> to some shortcomings. The inability of UML models to effectively convey
> high-level conceptual models and explicit knowledge semantics in a formal
> fashion is one of the key reasons the textual specification documents are
> required in addition to the UML. They not only provide more human-consumable
> characterizations of what is in the UML but they are also needed to explain
> semantics that cannot effectively be expressed in the UML. The upside is
> that some of these semantics can now be explicit in the documents but it is
> in an informal form and still open to human interpretation. What is
> ultimately needed for the language specs is a way to formally express the
> full range of language semantics and structure.
>
> I have personally asserted for a long while, and I know many in the
> community agree, that the long term solution for specifications of the
> languages is to define and express them using mechanisms purpose built to
> define languages like this. That is, utilizing semantic forms of
> specification such as OWL and RDFS. These forms while less familiar to many
> (part of the reason we decided to work from the bottom up) provide a way to
> clearly, explicitly, unambiguously and formally specify the high-level
> conceptual model for the languages, directly map it to any number of more
> detailed conceptual models, and then directly map it to specific
> syntactic/schematic representations (logical models).
> Many members of the community have been eager to begin working at this level
> but it was deemed important to first complete the abstraction work to the
> UML/textual specification level to serve as a XML-bias-free basis for
> initial semantic modeling. I propose that some of the CTI TCs early work
> should be focused on these activities. In fact, I would fairly strongly
> assert that many of the refactoring issues on the table for STIX 2.0 (e.g.,
> abstraction of several embedded structures (relationships, sources, assets,
> victims, etc.) to separate constructs) will require semantic modeling in
> order to fully understand and get right. I think the semantic discussions
> and modeling as part of these activities could serve as some great initial
> steps towards more formal specifications for the languages that serve not
> only better integration for each language across abstraction levels
> (conceptual to logical) but also better alignment and integration with
> related information representations within the cyber security sphere (MAEC,
> CAPEC, CVRF, OVAL, OpenIOC, etc.) and outside the cyber security sphere.
>
>
> So, that was a long contextual way of saying that I strongly agree with the
> need to understand and specify these languages across the abstraction
> spectrum (conceptual to lexical) but strongly feel that this should/must be
> done within the context of each language (I.e. within the STIX and CybOX SCs
> with cross coordination via the TC) rather than as a separate activity.
>
> Sean
>
> On 6/24/15, 11:39 AM, "Jerome Athias" <athiasjerome@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I'm a great fan of conceptual models!
>
> I skipped this step while reading the specifications to go directly to
> a data relational model, but I can see a lot of benefits producing a
> CMap, especially for new adopters (just because one picture can tell
> thousands of words). It's easy to share also (e.g. CmapTools)
>
> The issue that I think we would encounter, is not so much about the
> level of abstraction (multiple CMaps could resolve that), while there
> is not so much concepts there (in CTI). (I used to do CMap for complex
> systems)
> It is mainly, AGAIN, related to the taxonomy.
> You could see that when dealing with the extensions points, figuring
> out what would be the most appropriate standard/specification to map
> CTI to. Things that are around CTI and that you have to deal with,
> such like Assets, Vulnerabilities, Exploits, Shellcodes, etc.
> But I assure you that it's fascinating ;)
> And while all these things are somehow linked together, it makes quite
> difficult to make choice to -split- this into multiple models.
> (you could look at it in many ways, like asset-centric, risk-based,
> vulnerability-based, etc.)
>
> My 2c
>
>
> 2015-06-24 18:18 GMT+03:00 Cory Casanave <cory-c@modeldriven.com>:
>
> There is certainly a value in a DBMS capability, perhaps one that can be
> implemented across multiple technologies. This may then also relate to the
> "conceptual model" initiatives which have already started. A conceptual
> model can bridge the exchange and repository viewpoints and also allow for
> greater flexibility in implementation technologies. We have had great
> success in generating schema as well as transformations between them from
> models.
>
> With this in mind perhaps a conceptual and/or logical model subcommittee
> should be considered. Depending on the approach this could provide some of
> the value that is being sought for the database. A separation of concerns
> would allow for the definition of the database in models with implementation
> in one or more chosen technologies. Such implementation would probably be
> another activity.
>
> There is some grey area in what people call conceptual and logical models
> and the levels of abstraction each represents. For me (and many others), a
> conceptual model is a model of how the world is understood - it is then a
> model of the terms and concepts of the world, not a data model. An
> "instance" of a person in a conceptual model is a real person - not data. A
> logical model is then a technology independent data model about the world
> where choices are made as to structure and representation. An "instance" of
> a person in a logical model is data. An initial activity of a
> conceptual/logical model subcommittee could be to define the purpose, scope
> and appropriate level of abstraction.
>
> Of course the model activity is just as relevant to the exchange schema and
> can help make them more understandable as well as provide a basis for
> support of other technologies (essentially a model driven architecture
> approach).  This works best when the models are the normative definition and
> technology schema are generated from them. Since this tends to introduce
> more change (as well as more consistency), it would best be coupled with the
> second phase.
>
> There has already been work on conceptual models this direction seems
> consistent with the communities direction. With the above in mind we may
> want to consider a conceptual and/or logical model subcommittee.
>
> Regards,
> Cory Casanave
> Representing OMG
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: cti@lists.oasis-open.org [mailto:cti@lists.oasis-open.org] On Behalf
> Of Jerome Athias
> Sent: Wednesday, June 24, 2015 7:06 AM
> To: Eric Burger
> Cc: cti@lists.oasis-open.org
> Subject: Re: [cti] Database Subcommittee
>
> I wonder if providing consumer-oriented XQuery examples (maybe with the STIX
> idioms) would help providing guidance and test/validation cases
>
>
> 2015-06-22 14:20 GMT+03:00 Eric Burger <Eric.Burger@georgetown.edu>:
>
> Jerome (as he often does) gets this right in one (how about that - use a
> British colloquialism instead of a US one!).
>
> We just submitted a paper for publication at MILCOM looking at
> STIX/TAXII/CybOX versus IODEF/RID from the perspective of humans versus
> machines doing the processing. My guess is you can guess the end of the
> story: STIX/TAXII/CybOX is much better for machines. IODEF/RID is much
> better for people. Since the goal is for inter-machine communication, you
> get the point.
>
> It does mean there is a lot riding on VERY clear, implementable,
> interoperable specifications. Debugging this stuff is going to be a
> nightmare, more especially if the language is so nuanced there are dozens of
> ways of saying the same thing.
>
>
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