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Subject: Re: [cti] The Adaptive Object-Model Architectural Style


So I’ve been waiting for a good time to outline this and I guess here is as good a place as any. I’m sure people will disagree, but I’m going to say it anyway :)

Personally I think of these things as four levels:

- User requirements
- Implementations
- Instantiation of the data model (XML, JSON, database schemas, an object model in code, etc)
- Data model

User requirements get supported in running software. Running software uses instantiations of the data model to work with data in support of those user requirements. The data model and specification define the instantiations of the data and describe how to work with them in a standard way.

The important bit here is that there’s always running software between the user and the data model. That software is (likely) a tool that a vendor or open source project supports that contains custom code to work specifically with threat intel. It might be a more generic tool like Palantir or whatever people do RDF stuff with these days. But there’s always something.

This has a couple implications:

- Not all user requirements get met in the data model. It’s perfectly valid to decide not to support something in the data model if we think it’s fine that implementations do it in many different ways. For example, de-duplication: do we need a standard approach or should we let tools decide how to do de-duplication themselves? It’s a user requirement, but that doesn’t mean we need to address it in the specs.

- Some user requirements need to be translated before they get to the data model. For example, versioning: users have lots of needs for versioning. Systems also have requirements for versioning. What we put in the specs needs to consider both of these.

- This is the important part: some user requirements are beyond what software can do today. I would love it if my iphone would get 8 days of battery life. I could write that into some specification. That doesn’t mean it’s going to happen. In CTI, we (rightfully) have our eyes towards this end state where you can do all sorts of awesome things with your threat intel, but just putting it in the data model doesn’t automatically make that happen. We’re still exploring this domain and software can only do so much. So if the people writing software are telling us that the user requirements are too advanced (for now), maybe that means we should hold off on putting it in the data model until it’s something that we can actually implement? In my mind this is where a lot of the complexity in STIX comes from: we identified user requirements to do all these awesome things and so we put them in the data model, but we never considered how or whether software could really implement them. The perfect example here is data markings: users wanted to mark things at the field level, most software isn’t ready for that yet, and so we end up with data markings that are effectively broken in STIX 1.2. This is why many standards bodies have requirements for running code: otherwise the temptation is too great to define specification requirements that are not implementable and you end up with a great spec that nobody will use.

Sorry for the long rant. Been waiting to get that off my chest for awhile (as you can probably tell).

John

> On Nov 13, 2015, at 9:17 AM, Jerome Athias <athiasjerome@GMAIL.COM> wrote:
> 
> sorry for the others if off-topic.
> 
> Remember that a software is good only if it satisfies the users (meet,
> or exceed, their requirements).
> You can write 'perfect/optimized' code. If the users are not
> satisfied; it's a bad software.
> 
> Then,
> "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well
> enough.", Albert Einstein
> 
> Challenges are exciting, but sometimes difficult. It's about
> motivation and satisfaction.
> 
> There is not programming language better than an other (just like OS);
> it is just you that can select the best for your needs.
> 
> I did a conceptual map for the 'biggest Ruby project of the internet'
> (Metasploit Framework), it's just a picture, but represents 100 pages
> of documentation.
> I think we could optimize (like for a maturity model) our approach of
> resolving problems.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 2015-11-13 17:02 GMT+03:00 John Anderson <janderson@soltra.com>:
>> The list returns my mail, so probably you'll be the only one to get my reply.
>> 
>> Funny, I missed that quote from the document. And it's spot on. As an architect myself, I have built several  "elegant" architectures, only to find that the guys who actually had to use it just. never. quite. got it. (sigh)
>> 
>> My best architectures have emerged when I've written test code first. ("Test-first" really does work.) I've learned that writing code--while applying KISS, DRY and YAGNI--saves me from entering the architecture stratosphere. That's why I ask the architects to express their creations in code, and not only in UML.
>> 
>> I'm pretty vocal about Python, because it's by far the simplest popular language out there today. But this principal applies in any language: If the implementation is hard to explain, it's a bad idea. (Another quote from the Zen of Python.) Our standard has a lot that's hard to explain, esp. to new-comers. How can we simplify, so that it's almost a no-brainer to adopt?
>> 
>> Again, thanks for the article, and the conversation. I really do appreciate your point-of-view,
>> JSA
>> 
>> 
>> ________________________________________
>> From: Jerome Athias <athiasjerome@gmail.com>
>> Sent: Friday, November 13, 2015 8:45 AM
>> To: John Anderson
>> Cc: cti@lists.oasis-open.org
>> Subject: Re: [cti] The Adaptive Object-Model Architectural Style
>> 
>> Thanks for the feedback.
>> Kindly note that I'm not strongly defending this approach for the CTI
>> TC (at least for now).
>> Since you're using quotes:
>> "Architects that develop these types of systems are usually very proud
>> of them and claim that they are some of the best systems they have
>> ever developed. However, developers that have to use, extend or
>> maintain them, usually complain that they are hard to understand and
>> are not convinced that they are as great as the architect claims."
>> 
>> This, I hope could have our developers just understand
>> that what they feel difficult sometimes, is not intended to be
>> difficult per design, but because we are dealing with a complex domain
>> and
>> that the use of abstraction/conceptual approaches/ontology have benefits
>> 
>> Hopefully we can obtain consensus on a good balanced adapted approach.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 2015-11-13 16:24 GMT+03:00 John Anderson <janderson@soltra.com>:
>>> Jerome,
>>> Thanks for the link. I really enjoy those kinds of research papers.
>>> 
>>> On Page 20, the section "Maintaining the Model" [1] states pretty clearly that this type of architecture is very unwieldy, from an end-user perspective; consequently, it requires a ton of tooling development.
>>> 
>>> The advantage of such a model is that it's extensible and easily changed. But I'm not convinced that extensibility is really our friend. In my (greatly limited) experience, the extensibility of STIX and CybOX have made them that much harder to use and understand. I'm left wishing for "one obvious way to do things." [2]
>>> 
>>> If I were given the choice between (1) a very simple data model that's not extensible, but clear and easy to approach and (2) a generic, extensible data model whose extra layers of indirection make it hard to find the actual data, I'd gladly choose the first.
>>> 
>>> Keeping it simple,
>>> JSA
>>> 
>>> 
>>> [1] The full wording from "Maintaining the Model":
>>> The observation model is able to store all the metadata using a well-established
>>> mapping to relational databases, but it was not straightforward
>>> for a developer or analyst to put this data into the database. They would
>>> have to learn how the objects were saved in the database as well as the
>>> proper semantics for describing the business rules. A common solution to
>>> this is to develop editors and programming tools to assist users with using
>>> these black-box components [18]. This is part of the evolutionary process of
>>> Adaptive Object-Models as they are in a sense, “Black-Box” frameworks,
>>> and as they mature, they need editors and other support tools to aid in
>>> describing and maintaining the business rules.
>>> 
>>> [2] From "The Zen of Python": https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0020/
>>> 
>>> 
>>> ________________________________________
>>> From: cti@lists.oasis-open.org <cti@lists.oasis-open.org> on behalf of Jerome Athias <athiasjerome@gmail.com>
>>> Sent: Friday, November 13, 2015 5:20 AM
>>> To: cti@lists.oasis-open.org
>>> Subject: [cti] The Adaptive Object-Model Architectural Style
>>> 
>>> Greetings,
>>> 
>>> realizing that the community members have different background,
>>> experience, expectations and use of CTI in general, from an high-level
>>> (abstracted/conceptual/ontology oriented) point of view, through a
>>> day-to-day use (experienced) point of view, to a technical
>>> (implementation/code) point of view...
>>> I found this diagram (and document) interesting while easy to read and
>>> potentially adapted to our current effort.
>>> So just wanted to share.
>>> 
>>> http://www.adaptiveobjectmodel.com/WICSA3/ArchitectureOfAOMsWICSA3.pdf
>>> 
>>> Regards
> 
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