SPLF CSD and Dates

["Considine, Toby" <Toby.Considine@unc.edu>]

New member here, not here long enough to be able to drop comments on the GoogleDocsâ.of the excellent CSD for Stateless Packet Filtering

 

I have a comment on dates and the use of dates and schedules.

 

An event, of course is characterized by a beginning, a duration, and an ending. Pick any two and you can compute the third. This is all defined in SPLF in a manner that is almost but not the same as in WS-Calendar. As we plunge deeper into events, we are likely to get recurring patterns of eventsâperhaps in a future version of OpenC2.

 

As a cartoon, imagine the deny outgoing FTP command illustrated in the appendix being a rule for ânon-business hoursâ, with a complementary rule for business hours. These recurring patterns are defined in the RFC for vAvailability, profiled for M2M use as Availability in WS-Calendar. There is a complement âunavailabiltyâ, as well as rules to overlay them (a holiday weekend, or from here in the Carolinas, temporary disruptions of the business cycle). These are complimented during discovery to include willingness to perform a service as well as the pattern of requesting the service.

 

 

I recommend that the the time/date portions of the Command Arguments (start-time, end-time, duration) and the associated processing rules be reviewed for alignment with OASIS WS-Calendar PIM (http://docs.oasis-open.org/ws-calendar/ws-calendar-pim/v1.0/ws-calendar-pim-v1.0.html)

 

WS-Calendar compatibility is even more useful as cybersecurity directives extend to Industrial Control Systems. Sponsors of this effort have strong parallel efforts in cybersecurity for ICS,  (CI2P, et al.) and it would be good for these to be able to align. WS-Calendar conformance is included in new ASHRAE standards for Facilities Control as well as in standards for bringing distributed energy (power) logistics under IT control.

 

In particular, we should anticipate that future versions of this specification may include the Availability object, with overlays and templates, as addenda to the start/end/duration parameters.

 

tc