Cybersecurity leaders launch initiative to thwart attacks

The OASIS international consortium announced an industry initiative to bring interoperability and data sharing across cybersecurity products. With initial open source content and code contributed by IBM Security and McAfee, and formed under the auspices of OASIS, the Open Cybersecurity Alliance (OCA) brings together organizations and individuals from around the world to develop open source security technologies which can freely exchange information, insights, analytics, and orchestrated responses.

According to industry analyst firm, Enterprise Strategy Group, organizations use 25 to 49 different security tools from up to 10 vendors on average, each of which generates siloed data.  (Cybersecurity Landscape: The Evolution of Enterprise-class Vendors).

Connecting these tools and data requires complex integrations, taking away from time that could be spent hunting and responding to threats. To accelerate and optimize security for enterprise users, the OCA will develop protocols and standards which enable tools to work together and share information across vendors. The aim is to simplify the integration of security technologies across the threat lifecycle – from threat hunting and detection, to analytics, operations and response -- so that products can work together out of the box.

The purpose of the OCA is to develop and promote sets of open source common content, code, tooling, patterns, and practices for interoperability and sharing data among cybersecurity tools. For enterprise users, this means:

• Improving security visibility and ability to discover new insights and findings that might otherwise have been missed;
• Extracting more value from existing products and reducing vendor lock-in;
• Connecting data and sharing insights across products.

Founders of the Alliance, IBM Security and McAfee, are joined in the initiative by Advanced Cyber Security Corp, Corsa, CrowdStrike, CyberArk, Cybereason, DFLabs, EclecticIQ, Electric Power Research Institute, Fortinet, Indegy, New Context, ReversingLabs, SafeBreach, Syncurity, ThreatQuotient, and Tufin. The OCA welcomes participation from additional organizations and individual contributors.

Initial technology contributions to the open project are as follows, with additions expected as part of ongoing work:

• STIX-Shifter (from IBM Security): This project aims to create a universal, out-of-the box search capability for security products of all types, by providing a way to connect security products to other security, cloud, and software data repositories via a standardized cybersecurity data model (STIX 2). STIX-Shifter is an open source library which can identify information about potential threats within a wide variety of data repositories and translate it into a format that can be digested and analyzed by any security tool that has this standard enabled.
• OpenDXL Standard Ontology (from McAfee) focused on the development of an open and interoperable cybersecurity messaging format for use with the OpenDXL messaging bus. The OpenDXL Standard Ontology will be offered under the Apache 2.0 license.