Re: [cti] type changing from "object" to "array" for cyber observable objects

[Sean Barnum <sean.barnum@FireEye.com>]

I will take this opportunity to restate our strong assertion that observables should stand on their own as full objects with UUID-based identifiers and all the other metadata of SDOs.
This opinion was very strongly held by many at the time of the debate but was overruled by a majority of others.
The decision to fold observables into the arglebargle and to get rid of CybOX thus losing their context independence was what led players in the digital forensic community to leave the CTI TC and begin work on CASE/UCO separately as they did not believe it possible to support the needs of cyber investigation without observables as independent objects.
We at FireEye understand that this is the way that voting memberships work and we accepted the decision and have continued to work within the CTI TC to make the most we can of the situation.
This acceptance does not mean we agree with the decision then or now, only that we accept it as the consensus will of the TC members who voted at the time.
FireEye’s own model that integrates across CTI, DFIR, security operations, vulnerability management, malware analysis, threat detection, threat prevention, orchestration, etc treats observables as full objects as we believe that it is absolutely necessary to do so for many reasons, some obvious and some less obvious. Our desire to support STIX for partners/customers who request it means that conversion from our model to STIX will require extensive custom extensions and will also likely be lossy and/or inefficient for real world iterative sharing due to observable objects not being full objects.
We believe that eventually the CTI TC will recognize the need for observables to be full objects but we have carefully avoided any attempts to press the issue prematurely and cause unnecessary drama.
I hope that this message does not cause unnecessary drama but figured this was a good time to simply restate our position given the comments from Cheolho and Andras combined with several recent Slack comments from Bret questioning whether we should reconsider our decision regarding observables as full objects.

Sean Barnum
Principal Architect
FireEye
M: 703.473.8262
E: sean.barnum@fireeye.com

On 9/29/17, 4:06 AM, "cti@lists.oasis-open.org on behalf of Andras Iklody" <cti@lists.oasis-open.org on behalf of andras.iklody@circl.lu> wrote:

    Is the reasoning behind it explained anywhere? Whoever we've discussed
    STIX 2.x so far with had their faces buried deeply in their palms
    whenever they got to the part of the documentation that explained this
    very concept.

    Also, revising bad decisions, even if they were reached via concensus /
    a previous debate can be healthy for a standard. Especially when the
    only explanation we get each time we ask about this is "as thus has been
    decideth" without any reasoning given.

    Best regards,
    Andras


    On 29. sep. 2017 09:53, Trey Darley wrote:
    > On 29.09.2017 09:43:26, Andras Iklody wrote:
    >> 100% agreed! {"0":{}, "1":{}} is just ridiculous.
    >>
    >
    > All -
    >
    > Referring to STIX 2.0, Part 3, §2.5 "Observable Objects":
    >
    > "Each key in the dictionary SHOULD be a non-negative monotonically
    > increasing integer, incrementing by 1 from a starting value of 0, and
    > represented as a string within the JSON MTI serialization. However,
    > implementers MAY elect to use an alternate key format if necessary."
    >
    > As anyone participating in standards development work knows,
    > compromises are often necessary. The choice to standardize on a
    > monotonically increasing integer was a compromise following a lengthy
    > debate. Note, however, that this is a SHOULD. You're free to use
    > whatever you like as a key provided it's a valid JSON string.
    >

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