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Re: [cti-stix] Proposal - Top Level Relationship Object

  • 1.  Re: [cti-stix] Proposal - Top Level Relationship Object

    Posted 07-29-2015 22:07
    I was thinking back to the Admiralty Code ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Admiralty_code ) regarding reliability and credibility when I wrote that.  The idea was if someone had learned from a 3rd party that there was a relationship between Threat Group A and Threat Group B, but had not yet been able to determine the reliability/truthfulness of what that third party had said. They may want to send out that relationship, as kind of a 'something we've heard but not had a chance to verify ourselves'. That's where I was headed with the Unknown option. Maybe it would be better to use the terms from Information Reliability instead of Confidence when describing relationships within STIX? ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_source_and_information_reliability ) Rating Description 1 Confirmed Logical, consistent with other relevant information, confirmed by independent sources. 2 Probably true Logical, consistent with other relevant information, not confirmed. 3 Possibly true Reasonably logical, agrees with some relevant information, not confirmed. 4 Doubtfully true Not logical but possible, no other information on the subject, not confirmed. 5 Improbable Not logical, contradicted by other relevant information. 6 Cannot be judged The validity of the information can not be determined. Just a thought. Cheers Terry MacDonald STIX, TAXII, CybOX Consultant M: +61-407-203-026 E:  terry.macdonald@threatloop.com W:  www.threatloop.com 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 30 July 2015 at 07:12, Jason Keirstead < Jason.Keirstead@ca.ibm.com > wrote: What is the use case where someone is asserting something with no information behind it though? I am kind of lost on that. Why would it be being asserted? - Jason Keirstead Product Architect, Security Intelligence, IBM Security Systems www.ibm.com/security www.securityintelligence.com Without data, all you are is just another person with an opinion - Unknown Terry MacDonald ---2015/07/29 06:03:11 PM---I think there is a difference: 0 confidence = I have checked this information and I do not have any From: Terry MacDonald < terry.macdonald@threatloop.com > To: Jason Keirstead/CanEast/IBM@IBMCA Cc: "Wunder, John A." < jwunder@mitre.org >, Aharon Chernin < achernin@soltra.com >, "Baker, Jon" < bakerj@mitre.org >, "Jordan, Bret" < bret.jordan@bluecoat.com >, "Chris O'Brien" < COBrien@cert.gov.uk >, " cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org " < cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org >, JG on CTI-TC < jg@ctin.us > Date: 2015/07/29 06:03 PM Subject: Re: [cti-stix] Proposal - Top Level Relationship Object Sent by: < cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org > I think there is a difference: 0 confidence = I have checked this information and I do not have any faith that it is true. Unknown = There is no information to say if this is true or not true. We have no way to infer anything at present. --- I'd also say that there is the potential here for using something like the Admiralty code as a replacement for confidence..... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Admiralty_code : Reliability of Source A - Completely reliable B - Usually reliable C - Fairly reliable D - Not usually reliable E - Unreliable F - Reliability cannot be judged Accuracy of data (Credibility) 1 - Confirmed by other sources 2 - Probably True 3 - Possibly True 4 - Doubtful 5 - Improbable 6 - Truth cannot be judged Maybe that makes sense more so than Confidence? --- I also believe that we need to keep each relationship as a single direction relationship, to enable someone to discern a 'hierarchy' from the relationships they receive, rather than just a 'group' (as highlighted by others on the thread). If we combine all the relationships into a pool, we lose the ability of separating those relationships back out. I would like to keep the Source_ID and Target_ID separation. ID [1] [Required]: The ID of the relationship Version [ 1] [Required]: The version of the relationship; a simple number to be used with the ID for version control (instead of timestamp) Type [1] [Required]: The “type” of relationship being expressed.  (Not sure of how this works yet) Description [0..N] [Optional]: Words about the relationship. Source_ID [1] [Required] : The ID of one or more source entities in the relationship as a URI (not QName) Target_ID [1..N] [Required]: The ID of one or more targets in the relationship as a URI (not QName) Start_Time [0..1] [Required]: A timestamp in UTC stating when the relationship between the objects started, or the text 'unknown'. End_Time [0..1] [Required]: A timestamp in UTC stating when the relationship between the objects ended, or the text 'ongoing', or the text 'unknown'. Confidence [1] [Required]: A measure of confidence in the relationship.  (or should we look at Reliability/Credibility as discussed above?) Timestamp [0..1] [Required]: A timestamp in UTC stating when the relationship object was created.   Cheers Terry MacDonald STIX, TAXII, CybOX Consultant M: +61-407-203-026 E:  terry.macdonald@threatloop.com W:  www.threatloop.com 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 30 July 2015 at 05:25, Jason Keirstead < Jason.Keirstead@ca.ibm.com > wrote: Well... 0 would be exactly what it says... zero confidence, aka "no confidence". Is there a difference between "no confidence" and "unknown confidence"? To me they're the same thing... if you don't know, you don't know. - Jason Keirstead Product Architect, Security Intelligence, IBM Security Systems www.ibm.com/security www.securityintelligence.com Without data, all you are is just another person with an opinion - Unknown "Wunder, John A." ---2015/07/29 04:23:55 PM---I don't know, what does a confidence of 0 mean? To me the statement that the confidence is unknown i From: "Wunder, John A." < jwunder@mitre.org > To: Jason Keirstead/CanEast/IBM@IBMCA Cc: "Jordan, Bret" < bret.jordan@bluecoat.com >, Aharon Chernin < achernin@soltra.com >, "Baker, Jon" < bakerj@mitre.org >, JG on CTI-TC < jg@ctin.us >, "Chris O'Brien" < COBrien@cert.gov.uk >, " cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org " < cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org > Date: 2015/07/29 04:23 PM Subject: Re: [cti-stix] Proposal - Top Level Relationship Object I don't know, what does a confidence of 0 mean? To me the statement that the confidence is unknown is quite different from the statement that the confidence very low. From: < cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org > on behalf of Jason Keirstead Date: Wednesday, July 29, 2015 at 3:19 PM To: "Wunder, John A." Cc: "Jordan, Bret", Aharon Chernin, Jon Baker, JG on CTI-TC, Chris O'Brien, " cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org " Subject: Re: [cti-stix] Proposal - Top Level Relationship Object What is the difference between having confidence be optional or "unknown" and assigning a value of 0? - Jason Keirstead Product Architect, Security Intelligence, IBM Security Systems www.ibm.com/security www.securityintelligence.com Without data, all you are is just another person with an opinion - Unknown "Wunder, John A." ---2015/07/29 03:10:51 PM---I agree with you on reducing optionality but to me these "unknown" values are just hiding optionalit From: "Wunder, John A." < jwunder@mitre.org > To: "Jordan, Bret" < bret.jordan@bluecoat.com >, Aharon Chernin < achernin@soltra.com > Cc: "Baker, Jon" < bakerj@mitre.org >, JG on CTI-TC < jg@ctin.us >, "Chris O'Brien" < COBrien@cert.gov.uk >, " cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org " < cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org > Date: 2015/07/29 03:10 PM Subject: Re: [cti-stix] Proposal - Top Level Relationship Object Sent by: < cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org > I agree with you on reducing optionality but to me these "unknown" values are just hiding optionality rather than eliminating it. If anything it seems like having the field not present vs. a special "unknown" value is more obvious and explicit because it makes it clear that it's a special case. Otherwise you're going to have a lot of "if val == 'unknown'" code paths, and hardcoded strings with special meanings are bad. John From: "Jordan, Bret" Date: Wednesday, July 29, 2015 at 1:55 PM To: Aharon Chernin Cc: Jon Baker, "Wunder, John A.", JG on CTI-TC, Chris O'Brien, " cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org " Subject: Re: [cti-stix] Proposal - Top Level Relationship Object It has to be that way... Confidence has to be required, even if the the value is "unknown". We need to reduce the optionality and make code decision trees easier. Thanks, Bret Bret Jordan CISSP Director of Security Architecture and Standards Office of the CTO Blue Coat Systems PGP Fingerprint: 63B4 FC53 680A 6B7D 1447 F2C0 74F8 ACAE 7415 0050 "Without cryptography vihv vivc ce xhrnrw, however, the only thing that can not be unscrambled is an egg." On Jul 29, 2015, at 08:57, Aharon Chernin < achernin@soltra.com > wrote: Have you considered the case where an analyst wants to simply say that this collection of objects seems to be related? Wouldn't this just be a low confidence relationship? Aharon Chernin CTO SOLTRA An FS-ISAC & DTCC Company 18301 Bermuda green Dr Tampa, fl 33647 813.470.2173 achernin@soltra.com www.soltra.com From: cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org < cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org > on behalf of Baker, Jon < bakerj@mitre.org > Sent: Wednesday, July 29, 2015 8:37 AM To: Wunder, John A.; Jordan, Bret Cc: JG on CTI-TC; Chris O'Brien; cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org Subject: RE: [cti-stix] Proposal - Top Level Relationship Object John, Have you considered the case where an analyst wants to simply say that this collection of objects seems to be related? Imagine a case where you think that a bunch of things (incidents/observables/etc) are related, but you have not yet done the in depth analysis to understand the nature of their relationship. I had this sort of generic grouping of things in mind for a top level relationship object. In this case, I don’t think you could always have a From and To IDREF. You might just have a collection of IDREFs. Jon ============================================ Jonathan O. Baker J83D - Cyber Security Partnerships, Sharing, and Automation The MITRE Corporation Email: bakerj@mitre.org From: cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org [ mailto:cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org ] On Behalf Of Wunder, John A. Sent: Tuesday, July 28, 2015 4:15 PM To: Jordan, Bret < bret.jordan@bluecoat.com > Cc: JG on CTI-TC < jg@ctin.us >; Chris O'Brien < COBrien@cert.gov.uk >; cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org Subject: Re: [cti-stix] Proposal - Top Level Relationship Object Sure...personally I would do this, which is almost identical to what we do now (other than being at the top level rather than within an object): Relationship ID (for the relationship) [required] From IDREF [required] To IDREF [required] Relationship Qualifier [required] Confidence [optional] I'm undecided on whether information source information belongs in the STIX data model at all. By virtue of being in the data model it means someone is asserting it so it's impossible to verify. Digital signatures or something else out of the data model (relying on TAXII, etc.) seem like a better approach to me. But I don't have strong opinions on this and if we do include information source in the data model I would add that here. John From: "Jordan, Bret" Date: Tuesday, July 28, 2015 at 4:05 PM To: "Wunder, John A." Cc: JG on CTI-TC, Chris O'Brien, " cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org " Subject: Re: [cti-stix] Proposal - Top Level Relationship Object Great... Now we are discussing it... Please spell out what that would look like. Thanks, Bret Bret Jordan CISSP Director of Security Architecture and Standards Office of the CTO Blue Coat Systems PGP Fingerprint: 63B4 FC53 680A 6B7D 1447 F2C0 74F8 ACAE 7415 0050 "Without cryptography vihv vivc ce xhrnrw, however, the only thing that can not be unscrambled is an egg." On Jul 28, 2015, at 13:51, Wunder, John A. < jwunder@mitre.org > wrote: No directionality or description/qualifier? It seems like you want to be able to say *what* a relationship is describing and also which direction it goes in. I.e. TTP malware "is variant of" other TTP malware vs. TTP malware "is same as" other TTP malware given a different name by a different vendor From: < cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org > on behalf of "Jordan, Bret" Date: Tuesday, July 28, 2015 at 3:41 PM To: JG on CTI-TC Cc: Chris O'Brien, " cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org " Subject: Re: [cti-stix] Proposal - Top Level Relationship Object I see the relationship object being pretty simple and straight forward: Relationship IDREF (1-n) Source Confidence Thanks, Bret Bret Jordan CISSP Director of Security Architecture and Standards Office of the CTO Blue Coat Systems PGP Fingerprint: 63B4 FC53 680A 6B7D 1447 F2C0 74F8 ACAE 7415 0050 "Without cryptography vihv vivc ce xhrnrw, however, the only thing that can not be unscrambled is an egg." On Jul 28, 2015, at 13:16, JG on CTI-TC < jg@ctin.us > wrote: Chris: You are not going insane...we are all dealing with these same issues. Some of the more recent discussions (after you made this post) with respect to 'Sightings' seem to make a lot of sense to me...that is, to push the Sighting functionality further down in the data model...That is, down to the CybOX level... And I think we need to think about the Relationship object with respect to 'Communities of Interest'... For example, a malware research Community of Interest that is using Indicator, Observable, TTP and ExploitTarget may seek to express Relationships in a way that shows the Static and Behavioral characteristics of the malware (deep in the data model and at a very refined level of granularity) ...Whereas an Incident Response Community of Interest that is using Indicator, Incident and CourseOfAction may need the Relationship object defined in a separate way.... that is, one that is more tied to "actionable intelligence" which may then tie into ExploitTarget, ThreatActor, and Campaign...which then becomes of interest to a law enforcement Community of Interest. Of course... handling this may take us back into the debate on Profiles... Jane Ginn CTIN On 7/27/2015 3:44 AM, Chris O'Brien wrote: For what it's worth, from me, I think this would be pretty huge (coupled with the sightings object as well). As an analyst trying to identify useful data for my customers on large data sets, I'm interested in being able to produce top-level, automated assessments on data quality of feeds/dbs of stix data, and one of the ways that I'd suggest that a specific data point is of a 'high quality' is if it has multiple relationships and/or sightings. Add in to that the ability to rank producers, and even analytical assertion confidence, and you've got all the makings of a an algorithm for a heuristic grading scheme that could feed something even more awesome...like a machine learning project that can conduct threat pattern detection... As you say, Bret, this also gives scope for those relationships to have their own concept of 'quality' based on their related analytical assertions / confidence. I'd perhaps throw in to the discussion that it may not need to be a standalone object in its own right - we're currently experimenting with using the existing stix architecture relationships (with a little extra meta data) to achieve the desired effect, but it gets messy quickly and direct references to the relationships are by-way-of the object that they sit on (then you ask...which end of the relationship is the 'master' for that relationship, or must they both be updated when a change is made...what happens if one of them isn't in your namespace, etc, etc). Jimmy-rigging solutions to those issues feels feasible, but messy, prescriptive and makes anyone with a coding background have a little cry to themselves. It's something we're having to think about here at the moment - just wanted to mention that it's still possible and would be less impactful to existing deployments. Cheers, cob PS: If anyone else is looking in to this sort of heuristic / predictive / minority report-esque implementation, it'd be good to hear from you. If only to confirm that I'm not going completely insane.


  • 2.  Re: [cti-stix] Proposal - Top Level Relationship Object

    Posted 07-29-2015 22:13
    Terry I like where you are going with this..... Thanks, Bret Bret Jordan CISSP Director of Security Architecture and Standards Office of the CTO Blue Coat Systems PGP Fingerprint: 63B4 FC53 680A 6B7D 1447  F2C0 74F8 ACAE 7415 0050 Without cryptography vihv vivc ce xhrnrw, however, the only thing that can not be unscrambled is an egg.   On Jul 29, 2015, at 16:06, Terry MacDonald < terry.macdonald@threatloop.com > wrote: I was thinking back to the Admiralty Code ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Admiralty_code ) regarding reliability and credibility when I wrote that.  The idea was if someone had learned from a 3rd party that there was a relationship between Threat Group A and Threat Group B, but had not yet been able to determine the reliability/truthfulness of what that third party had said. They may want to send out that relationship, as kind of a 'something we've heard but not had a chance to verify ourselves'. That's where I was headed with the Unknown option. Maybe it would be better to use the terms from Information Reliability instead of Confidence when describing relationships within STIX? ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_source_and_information_reliability ) Rating Description 1 Confirmed Logical, consistent with other relevant information, confirmed by independent sources. 2 Probably true Logical, consistent with other relevant information, not confirmed. 3 Possibly true Reasonably logical, agrees with some relevant information, not confirmed. 4 Doubtfully true Not logical but possible, no other information on the subject, not confirmed. 5 Improbable Not logical, contradicted by other relevant information. 6 Cannot be judged The validity of the information can not be determined. Just a thought. Cheers Terry MacDonald STIX, TAXII, CybOX Consultant M: +61-407-203-026 E:  terry.macdonald@threatloop.com W:  www.threatloop.com 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 30 July 2015 at 07:12, Jason Keirstead < Jason.Keirstead@ca.ibm.com > wrote: What is the use case where someone is asserting something with no information behind it though? I am kind of lost on that. Why would it be being asserted? - Jason Keirstead Product Architect, Security Intelligence, IBM Security Systems www.ibm.com/security www.securityintelligence.com Without data, all you are is just another person with an opinion - Unknown <graycol.gif> Terry MacDonald ---2015/07/29 06:03:11 PM---I think there is a difference: 0 confidence = I have checked this information and I do not have any From: Terry MacDonald < terry.macdonald@threatloop.com > To: Jason Keirstead/CanEast/IBM@IBMCA Cc: Wunder, John A. < jwunder@mitre.org >, Aharon Chernin < achernin@soltra.com >, Baker, Jon < bakerj@mitre.org >, Jordan, Bret < bret.jordan@bluecoat.com >, Chris O'Brien < COBrien@cert.gov.uk >, cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org < cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org >, JG on CTI-TC < jg@ctin.us > Date: 2015/07/29 06:03 PM Subject: Re: [cti-stix] Proposal - Top Level Relationship Object Sent by: < cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org > I think there is a difference: 0 confidence = I have checked this information and I do not have any faith that it is true. Unknown = There is no information to say if this is true or not true. We have no way to infer anything at present. --- I'd also say that there is the potential here for using something like the Admiralty code as a replacement for confidence..... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Admiralty_code : Reliability of Source A - Completely reliable B - Usually reliable C - Fairly reliable D - Not usually reliable E - Unreliable F - Reliability cannot be judged Accuracy of data (Credibility) 1 - Confirmed by other sources 2 - Probably True 3 - Possibly True 4 - Doubtful 5 - Improbable 6 - Truth cannot be judged Maybe that makes sense more so than Confidence? --- I also believe that we need to keep each relationship as a single direction relationship, to enable someone to discern a 'hierarchy' from the relationships they receive, rather than just a 'group' (as highlighted by others on the thread). If we combine all the relationships into a pool, we lose the ability of separating those relationships back out. I would like to keep the Source_ID and Target_ID separation. ID [1] [Required]: The ID of the relationship Version [ 1] [Required]: The version of the relationship; a simple number to be used with the ID for version control (instead of timestamp) Type [1] [Required]: The “type” of relationship being expressed.  (Not sure of how this works yet) Description [0..N] [Optional]: Words about the relationship. Source_ID [1] [Required] : The ID of one or more source entities in the relationship as a URI (not QName) Target_ID [1..N] [Required]: The ID of one or more targets in the relationship as a URI (not QName) Start_Time [0..1] [Required]: A timestamp in UTC stating when the relationship between the objects started, or the text 'unknown'. End_Time [0..1] [Required]: A timestamp in UTC stating when the relationship between the objects ended, or the text 'ongoing', or the text 'unknown'. Confidence [1] [Required]: A measure of confidence in the relationship.  (or should we look at Reliability/Credibility as discussed above?) Timestamp [0..1] [Required]: A timestamp in UTC stating when the relationship object was created.   Cheers Terry MacDonald STIX, TAXII, CybOX Consultant M: +61-407-203-026 E:  terry.macdonald@threatloop.com W:  www.threatloop.com 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 30 July 2015 at 05:25, Jason Keirstead < Jason.Keirstead@ca.ibm.com > wrote: Well... 0 would be exactly what it says... zero confidence, aka no confidence . Is there a difference between no confidence and unknown confidence ? To me they're the same thing... if you don't know, you don't know. - Jason Keirstead Product Architect, Security Intelligence, IBM Security Systems www.ibm.com/security www.securityintelligence.com Without data, all you are is just another person with an opinion - Unknown <graycol.gif> Wunder, John A. ---2015/07/29 04:23:55 PM---I don't know, what does a confidence of 0 mean? To me the statement that the confidence is unknown i From: Wunder, John A. < jwunder@mitre.org > To: Jason Keirstead/CanEast/IBM@IBMCA Cc: Jordan, Bret < bret.jordan@bluecoat.com >, Aharon Chernin < achernin@soltra.com >, Baker, Jon < bakerj@mitre.org >, JG on CTI-TC < jg@ctin.us >, Chris O'Brien < COBrien@cert.gov.uk >, cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org < cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org > Date: 2015/07/29 04:23 PM Subject: Re: [cti-stix] Proposal - Top Level Relationship Object I don't know, what does a confidence of 0 mean? To me the statement that the confidence is unknown is quite different from the statement that the confidence very low. From: < cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org > on behalf of Jason Keirstead Date: Wednesday, July 29, 2015 at 3:19 PM To: Wunder, John A. Cc: Jordan, Bret , Aharon Chernin, Jon Baker, JG on CTI-TC, Chris O'Brien, cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org Subject: Re: [cti-stix] Proposal - Top Level Relationship Object What is the difference between having confidence be optional or unknown and assigning a value of 0? - Jason Keirstead Product Architect, Security Intelligence, IBM Security Systems www.ibm.com/security www.securityintelligence.com Without data, all you are is just another person with an opinion - Unknown <graycol.gif> Wunder, John A. ---2015/07/29 03:10:51 PM---I agree with you on reducing optionality but to me these unknown values are just hiding optionalit From: Wunder, John A. < jwunder@mitre.org > To: Jordan, Bret < bret.jordan@bluecoat.com >, Aharon Chernin < achernin@soltra.com > Cc: Baker, Jon < bakerj@mitre.org >, JG on CTI-TC < jg@ctin.us >, Chris O'Brien < COBrien@cert.gov.uk >, cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org < cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org > Date: 2015/07/29 03:10 PM Subject: Re: [cti-stix] Proposal - Top Level Relationship Object Sent by: < cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org > I agree with you on reducing optionality but to me these unknown values are just hiding optionality rather than eliminating it. If anything it seems like having the field not present vs. a special unknown value is more obvious and explicit because it makes it clear that it's a special case. Otherwise you're going to have a lot of if val == 'unknown' code paths, and hardcoded strings with special meanings are bad. John From: Jordan, Bret Date: Wednesday, July 29, 2015 at 1:55 PM To: Aharon Chernin Cc: Jon Baker, Wunder, John A. , JG on CTI-TC, Chris O'Brien, cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org Subject: Re: [cti-stix] Proposal - Top Level Relationship Object It has to be that way... Confidence has to be required, even if the the value is unknown . We need to reduce the optionality and make code decision trees easier. Thanks, Bret Bret Jordan CISSP Director of Security Architecture and Standards Office of the CTO Blue Coat Systems PGP Fingerprint: 63B4 FC53 680A 6B7D 1447 F2C0 74F8 ACAE 7415 0050 Without cryptography vihv vivc ce xhrnrw, however, the only thing that can not be unscrambled is an egg. On Jul 29, 2015, at 08:57, Aharon Chernin < achernin@soltra.com > wrote: Have you considered the case where an analyst wants to simply say that this collection of objects seems to be related? Wouldn't this just be a low confidence relationship? Aharon Chernin CTO SOLTRA An FS-ISAC & DTCC Company 18301 Bermuda green Dr Tampa, fl 33647 813.470.2173 achernin@soltra.com www.soltra.com From: cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org < cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org > on behalf of Baker, Jon < bakerj@mitre.org > Sent: Wednesday, July 29, 2015 8:37 AM To: Wunder, John A.; Jordan, Bret Cc: JG on CTI-TC; Chris O'Brien; cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org Subject: RE: [cti-stix] Proposal - Top Level Relationship Object John, Have you considered the case where an analyst wants to simply say that this collection of objects seems to be related? Imagine a case where you think that a bunch of things (incidents/observables/etc) are related, but you have not yet done the in depth analysis to understand the nature of their relationship. I had this sort of generic grouping of things in mind for a top level relationship object. In this case, I don’t think you could always have a From and To IDREF. You might just have a collection of IDREFs. Jon ============================================ Jonathan O. Baker J83D - Cyber Security Partnerships, Sharing, and Automation The MITRE Corporation Email: bakerj@mitre.org From: cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org [ mailto:cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org ] On Behalf Of Wunder, John A. Sent: Tuesday, July 28, 2015 4:15 PM To: Jordan, Bret < bret.jordan@bluecoat.com > Cc: JG on CTI-TC < jg@ctin.us >; Chris O'Brien < COBrien@cert.gov.uk >; cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org Subject: Re: [cti-stix] Proposal - Top Level Relationship Object Sure...personally I would do this, which is almost identical to what we do now (other than being at the top level rather than within an object): Relationship ID (for the relationship) [required] From IDREF [required] To IDREF [required] Relationship Qualifier [required] Confidence [optional] I'm undecided on whether information source information belongs in the STIX data model at all. By virtue of being in the data model it means someone is asserting it so it's impossible to verify. Digital signatures or something else out of the data model (relying on TAXII, etc.) seem like a better approach to me. But I don't have strong opinions on this and if we do include information source in the data model I would add that here. John From: Jordan, Bret Date: Tuesday, July 28, 2015 at 4:05 PM To: Wunder, John A. Cc: JG on CTI-TC, Chris O'Brien, cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org Subject: Re: [cti-stix] Proposal - Top Level Relationship Object Great... Now we are discussing it... Please spell out what that would look like. Thanks, Bret Bret Jordan CISSP Director of Security Architecture and Standards Office of the CTO Blue Coat Systems PGP Fingerprint: 63B4 FC53 680A 6B7D 1447 F2C0 74F8 ACAE 7415 0050 Without cryptography vihv vivc ce xhrnrw, however, the only thing that can not be unscrambled is an egg. On Jul 28, 2015, at 13:51, Wunder, John A. < jwunder@mitre.org > wrote: No directionality or description/qualifier? It seems like you want to be able to say *what* a relationship is describing and also which direction it goes in. I.e. TTP malware is variant of other TTP malware vs. TTP malware is same as other TTP malware given a different name by a different vendor From: < cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org > on behalf of Jordan, Bret Date: Tuesday, July 28, 2015 at 3:41 PM To: JG on CTI-TC Cc: Chris O'Brien, cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org Subject: Re: [cti-stix] Proposal - Top Level Relationship Object I see the relationship object being pretty simple and straight forward: Relationship IDREF (1-n) Source Confidence Thanks, Bret Bret Jordan CISSP Director of Security Architecture and Standards Office of the CTO Blue Coat Systems PGP Fingerprint: 63B4 FC53 680A 6B7D 1447 F2C0 74F8 ACAE 7415 0050 Without cryptography vihv vivc ce xhrnrw, however, the only thing that can not be unscrambled is an egg. On Jul 28, 2015, at 13:16, JG on CTI-TC < jg@ctin.us > wrote: Chris: You are not going insane...we are all dealing with these same issues. Some of the more recent discussions (after you made this post) with respect to 'Sightings' seem to make a lot of sense to me...that is, to push the Sighting functionality further down in the data model...That is, down to the CybOX level... And I think we need to think about the Relationship object with respect to 'Communities of Interest'... For example, a malware research Community of Interest that is using Indicator, Observable, TTP and ExploitTarget may seek to express Relationships in a way that shows the Static and Behavioral characteristics of the malware (deep in the data model and at a very refined level of granularity) ...Whereas an Incident Response Community of Interest that is using Indicator, Incident and CourseOfAction may need the Relationship object defined in a separate way.... that is, one that is more tied to actionable intelligence which may then tie into ExploitTarget, ThreatActor, and Campaign...which then becomes of interest to a law enforcement Community of Interest. Of course... handling this may take us back into the debate on Profiles... Jane Ginn CTIN On 7/27/2015 3:44 AM, Chris O'Brien wrote: For what it's worth, from me, I think this would be pretty huge (coupled with the sightings object as well). As an analyst trying to identify useful data for my customers on large data sets, I'm interested in being able to produce top-level, automated assessments on data quality of feeds/dbs of stix data, and one of the ways that I'd suggest that a specific data point is of a 'high quality' is if it has multiple relationships and/or sightings. Add in to that the ability to rank producers, and even analytical assertion confidence, and you've got all the makings of a an algorithm for a heuristic grading scheme that could feed something even more awesome...like a machine learning project that can conduct threat pattern detection... As you say, Bret, this also gives scope for those relationships to have their own concept of 'quality' based on their related analytical assertions / confidence. I'd perhaps throw in to the discussion that it may not need to be a standalone object in its own right - we're currently experimenting with using the existing stix architecture relationships (with a little extra meta data) to achieve the desired effect, but it gets messy quickly and direct references to the relationships are by-way-of the object that they sit on (then you ask...which end of the relationship is the 'master' for that relationship, or must they both be updated when a change is made...what happens if one of them isn't in your namespace, etc, etc). Jimmy-rigging solutions to those issues feels feasible, but messy, prescriptive and makes anyone with a coding background have a little cry to themselves. It's something we're having to think about here at the moment - just wanted to mention that it's still possible and would be less impactful to existing deployments. Cheers, cob PS: If anyone else is looking in to this sort of heuristic / predictive / minority report-esque implementation, it'd be good to hear from you. If only to confirm that I'm not going completely insane.


  • 3.  Re: [cti-stix] Proposal - Top Level Relationship Object

    Posted 07-29-2015 22:23





    I like this.









    From: "Jordan, Bret"
    Date: Wednesday, July 29, 2015 at 6:12 PM
    To: Terry MacDonald
    Cc: Jason Keirstead, "Wunder, John A.", Aharon Chernin, Jon Baker, Chris O'Brien, " cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org ", JG on CTI-TC
    Subject: Re: [cti-stix] Proposal - Top Level Relationship Object





    Terry I like where you are going with this.....











    Thanks,


    Bret











    Bret Jordan CISSP

    Director of Security Architecture and Standards Office of the CTO

    Blue Coat Systems

    PGP Fingerprint: 63B4 FC53 680A 6B7D 1447  F2C0 74F8 ACAE 7415 0050
    "Without cryptography vihv vivc ce xhrnrw, however, the only thing that can not be unscrambled is an egg." 











    On Jul 29, 2015, at 16:06, Terry MacDonald < terry.macdonald@threatloop.com > wrote:


    I was thinking back to the Admiralty Code ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Admiralty_code ) regarding reliability and credibility when I wrote that.  The idea was if someone
    had learned from a 3rd party that there was a relationship between Threat Group A and Threat Group B, but had not yet been able to determine the reliability/truthfulness of what that third party had said. They may want to send out that relationship, as kind
    of a 'something we've heard but not had a chance to verify ourselves'. That's where I was headed with the Unknown option.


    Maybe it would be better to use the terms from Information Reliability instead of Confidence when describing relationships within STIX? ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_source_and_information_reliability )







    Rating

    Description


    1
    Confirmed
    Logical, consistent with other relevant information, confirmed by independent sources.


    2
    Probably true
    Logical, consistent with other relevant information, not confirmed.


    3
    Possibly true
    Reasonably logical, agrees with some relevant information, not confirmed.


    4
    Doubtfully true
    Not logical but possible, no other information on the subject, not confirmed.


    5
    Improbable
    Not logical, contradicted by other relevant information.


    6
    Cannot be judged
    The validity of the information can not be determined.






    Just a thought.










    Cheers

    Terry MacDonald STIX, TAXII, CybOX Consultant



    M: +61-407-203-026
    E:  terry.macdonald@threatloop.com
    W:  www.threatloop.com






    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 30 July 2015 at 07:12, Jason Keirstead
    < Jason.Keirstead@ca.ibm.com > wrote:


    What is the use case where someone is asserting something with no information behind it though? I am kind of lost on that. Why would it be being asserted?

    -
    Jason Keirstead
    Product Architect, Security Intelligence, IBM Security Systems
    www.ibm.com/security
    www.securityintelligence.com

    Without data, all you are is just another person with an opinion - Unknown


    <graycol.gif> Terry MacDonald ---2015/07/29 06:03:11 PM---I think there is a difference: 0 confidence = I have checked this information and
    I do not have any

    From: Terry MacDonald < terry.macdonald@threatloop.com >
    To: Jason Keirstead/CanEast/IBM@IBMCA
    Cc: "Wunder, John A." < jwunder@mitre.org >, Aharon Chernin < achernin@soltra.com >,
    "Baker, Jon" < bakerj@mitre.org >, "Jordan, Bret" < bret.jordan@bluecoat.com >, "Chris O'Brien" < COBrien@cert.gov.uk >,
    " cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org " < cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org >, JG on CTI-TC < jg@ctin.us >
    Date: 2015/07/29 06:03 PM
    Subject: Re: [cti-stix] Proposal - Top Level Relationship Object
    Sent by: < cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org >






    I think there is a difference:

    0 confidence = I have checked this information and I do not have any faith that it is true.
    Unknown = There is no information to say if this is true or not true. We have no way to infer anything at present.

    ---

    I'd also say that there is the potential here for using something like the Admiralty code as a replacement for confidence..... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Admiralty_code :

    Reliability of Source
    A - Completely reliable
    B - Usually reliable
    C - Fairly reliable
    D - Not usually reliable
    E - Unreliable
    F - Reliability cannot be judged

    Accuracy of data (Credibility)
    1 - Confirmed by other sources
    2 - Probably True
    3 - Possibly True
    4 - Doubtful
    5 - Improbable
    6 - Truth cannot be judged

    Maybe that makes sense more so than Confidence?

    ---

    I also believe that we need to keep each relationship as a single direction relationship, to enable someone to discern a 'hierarchy' from the relationships they receive, rather than just a 'group' (as highlighted by others on the thread).
    If we combine all the relationships into a pool, we lose the ability of separating those relationships back out. I would like to keep the Source_ID and Target_ID separation.


    ID [1] [Required]: The ID of the relationship Version [ 1] [Required]: The version of the relationship; a simple number to be used with the ID for version control (instead of timestamp) Type [1] [Required]: The “type” of relationship being expressed.  (Not sure of how this works yet) Description [0..N] [Optional]: Words about the relationship. Source_ID [1] [Required] : The ID of one or more source entities in the relationship as a URI (not QName) Target_ID [1..N] [Required]: The ID of one or more targets in the relationship as a URI (not QName) Start_Time [0..1] [Required]: A timestamp in UTC stating when the relationship between the objects started, or the text 'unknown'. End_Time [0..1] [Required]: A timestamp in UTC stating when the relationship between the objects ended, or the text 'ongoing', or the text 'unknown'. Confidence [1] [Required]: A measure of confidence in the relationship.  (or should we look at Reliability/Credibility as discussed above?) Timestamp [0..1] [Required]: A timestamp in UTC stating when the relationship object was created.

     

    Cheers

    Terry MacDonald STIX, TAXII, CybOX Consultant



    M:
    +61-407-203-026
    E:  terry.macdonald@threatloop.com
    W:  www.threatloop.com



    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 30 July 2015 at 05:25, Jason Keirstead < Jason.Keirstead@ca.ibm.com >
    wrote:

    Well... 0 would be exactly what it says... zero confidence, aka "no confidence".


    Is there a difference between "no confidence" and "unknown confidence"? To me they're the same thing... if you don't know, you don't know.

    -
    Jason Keirstead
    Product Architect, Security Intelligence, IBM Security Systems
    www.ibm.com/security
    www.securityintelligence.com

    Without data, all you are is just another person with an opinion - Unknown


    <graycol.gif> "Wunder, John A." ---2015/07/29 04:23:55 PM---I don't know, what does a confidence of 0 mean? To me the statement that the confidence
    is unknown i

    From: "Wunder, John A." < jwunder@mitre.org >
    To: Jason Keirstead/CanEast/IBM@IBMCA
    Cc: "Jordan, Bret" < bret.jordan@bluecoat.com >, Aharon Chernin < achernin@soltra.com >,
    "Baker, Jon" < bakerj@mitre.org >, JG on CTI-TC < jg@ctin.us >,
    "Chris O'Brien" < COBrien@cert.gov.uk >, " cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org "
    < cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org >
    Date: 2015/07/29 04:23 PM
    Subject: Re: [cti-stix] Proposal - Top Level Relationship Object





    I don't know, what does a confidence of 0 mean?

    To me the statement that the confidence is unknown is quite different from the statement that the confidence very low.

    From: < cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org >
    on behalf of Jason Keirstead
    Date: Wednesday, July 29, 2015 at 3:19 PM
    To: "Wunder, John A."
    Cc: "Jordan, Bret", Aharon Chernin, Jon Baker, JG on CTI-TC, Chris O'Brien, " cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org "
    Subject: Re: [cti-stix] Proposal - Top Level Relationship Object
    What is the difference between having confidence be optional or "unknown" and assigning a value of 0?



    -
    Jason Keirstead
    Product Architect, Security Intelligence, IBM Security Systems
    www.ibm.com/security
    www.securityintelligence.com



    Without data, all you are is just another person with an opinion - Unknown


    <graycol.gif> "Wunder, John A." ---2015/07/29 03:10:51 PM---I agree with you on reducing optionality but to me these "unknown" values
    are just hiding optionalit

    From: "Wunder, John A." < jwunder@mitre.org >
    To: "Jordan, Bret" < bret.jordan@bluecoat.com >,
    Aharon Chernin < achernin@soltra.com >
    Cc: "Baker, Jon" < bakerj@mitre.org >,
    JG on CTI-TC < jg@ctin.us >, "Chris O'Brien" < COBrien@cert.gov.uk >,
    " cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org " < cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org >
    Date: 2015/07/29 03:10 PM
    Subject: Re: [cti-stix] Proposal - Top Level Relationship Object
    Sent by: < cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org >






    I agree with you on reducing optionality but to me these "unknown" values are just hiding optionality rather than eliminating it.

    If anything it seems like having the field not present vs. a special "unknown" value is more obvious and explicit because it makes it clear that it's a special case. Otherwise you're going to have a lot of "if val == 'unknown'" code paths, and hardcoded strings
    with special meanings are bad.

    John

    From: "Jordan, Bret"
    Date: Wednesday, July 29, 2015 at 1:55 PM
    To: Aharon Chernin
    Cc: Jon Baker, "Wunder, John A.", JG on CTI-TC, Chris O'Brien, " cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org "
    Subject: Re: [cti-stix] Proposal - Top Level Relationship Object

    It has to be that way... Confidence has to be required, even if the the value is "unknown". We need to reduce the optionality and make code decision trees easier.


    Thanks,

    Bret



    Bret Jordan CISSP
    Director of Security Architecture and Standards Office of the CTO
    Blue Coat Systems
    PGP Fingerprint: 63B4 FC53 680A 6B7D 1447 F2C0 74F8 ACAE 7415 0050
    "Without cryptography vihv vivc ce xhrnrw, however, the only thing that can not be unscrambled is an egg."









    On Jul 29, 2015, at 08:57, Aharon Chernin < achernin@soltra.com >
    wrote:

    Have you considered the case where an analyst wants to simply say that this collection of objects seems to be related?

    Wouldn't this just be a low confidence relationship?

    Aharon Chernin
    CTO
    SOLTRA An FS-ISAC & DTCC Company
    18301 Bermuda green Dr
    Tampa, fl 33647
    813.470.2173 achernin@soltra.com
    www.soltra.com





    From: cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org
    < cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org > on behalf of Baker, Jon
    < bakerj@mitre.org >
    Sent: Wednesday, July 29, 2015 8:37 AM
    To: Wunder, John A.; Jordan, Bret
    Cc: JG on CTI-TC; Chris O'Brien;
    cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org
    Subject: RE: [cti-stix] Proposal - Top Level Relationship Object

    John,

    Have you considered the case where an analyst wants to simply say that this collection of objects seems to be related?

    Imagine a case where you think that a bunch of things (incidents/observables/etc) are related, but you have not yet done the in depth analysis to understand the nature of their relationship. I had this sort of generic grouping of things in mind for a top level
    relationship object. In this case, I don’t think you could always have a From and To IDREF. You might just have a collection of IDREFs.

    Jon

    ============================================
    Jonathan O. Baker
    J83D - Cyber Security Partnerships, Sharing, and Automation
    The MITRE Corporation
    Email: bakerj@mitre.org

    From: cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org
    [ mailto:cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org ]
    On Behalf Of Wunder, John A.
    Sent: Tuesday, July 28, 2015 4:15 PM
    To: Jordan, Bret < bret.jordan@bluecoat.com >
    Cc: JG on CTI-TC < jg@ctin.us >;
    Chris O'Brien < COBrien@cert.gov.uk >;
    cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org
    Subject: Re: [cti-stix] Proposal - Top Level Relationship Object

    Sure...personally I would do this, which is almost identical to what we do now (other than being at the top level rather than within an object):

    Relationship
    ID (for the relationship) [required]
    From IDREF [required]
    To IDREF [required]
    Relationship Qualifier [required]
    Confidence [optional]

    I'm undecided on whether information source information belongs in the STIX data model at all. By virtue of being in the data model it means someone is asserting it so it's impossible to verify. Digital signatures or something else out of the data model (relying
    on TAXII, etc.) seem like a better approach to me. But I don't have strong opinions on this and if we do include information source in the data model I would add that here.

    John

    From: "Jordan, Bret"
    Date: Tuesday, July 28, 2015 at 4:05 PM
    To: "Wunder, John A."
    Cc: JG on CTI-TC, Chris O'Brien, " cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org "
    Subject: Re: [cti-stix] Proposal - Top Level Relationship Object

    Great... Now we are discussing it... Please spell out what that would look like.


    Thanks,

    Bret



    Bret Jordan CISSP
    Director of Security Architecture and Standards Office of the CTO
    Blue Coat Systems
    PGP Fingerprint: 63B4 FC53 680A 6B7D 1447 F2C0 74F8 ACAE 7415 0050
    "Without cryptography vihv vivc ce xhrnrw, however, the only thing that can not be unscrambled is an egg."









    On Jul 28, 2015, at 13:51, Wunder, John A. < jwunder@mitre.org >
    wrote:

    No directionality or description/qualifier? It seems like you want to be able to say *what* a relationship is describing and also which direction it goes in.

    I.e. TTP malware "is variant of" other TTP malware
    vs. TTP malware "is same as" other TTP malware given a different name by a different vendor

    From: < cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org >
    on behalf of "Jordan, Bret"
    Date: Tuesday, July 28, 2015 at 3:41 PM
    To: JG on CTI-TC
    Cc: Chris O'Brien, " cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org "
    Subject: Re: [cti-stix] Proposal - Top Level Relationship Object

    I see the relationship object being pretty simple and straight forward:


    Relationship
    IDREF (1-n)
    Source
    Confidence

    Thanks,

    Bret



    Bret Jordan CISSP
    Director of Security Architecture and Standards Office of the CTO
    Blue Coat Systems
    PGP Fingerprint: 63B4 FC53 680A 6B7D 1447 F2C0 74F8 ACAE 7415 0050
    "Without cryptography vihv vivc ce xhrnrw, however, the only thing that can not be unscrambled is an egg."









    On Jul 28, 2015, at 13:16, JG on CTI-TC < jg@ctin.us >
    wrote:

    Chris:

    You are not going insane...we are all dealing with these same issues.

    Some of the more recent discussions (after you made this post) with
    respect to 'Sightings' seem to make a lot of sense to me...that is, to
    push the Sighting functionality further down in the data model...That
    is, down to the CybOX level...

    And I think we need to think about the Relationship object with respect
    to 'Communities of Interest'... For example, a malware research
    Community of Interest that is using Indicator, Observable, TTP and
    ExploitTarget may seek to express Relationships in a way that shows the
    Static and Behavioral characteristics of the malware (deep in the data
    model and at a very refined level of granularity)

    ...Whereas an Incident Response Community of Interest that is using
    Indicator, Incident and CourseOfAction may need the Relationship object
    defined in a separate way.... that is, one that is more tied to
    "actionable intelligence" which may then tie into ExploitTarget,
    ThreatActor, and Campaign...which then becomes of interest to a law
    enforcement Community of Interest.

    Of course... handling this may take us back into the debate on Profiles...

    Jane Ginn
    CTIN

    On 7/27/2015 3:44 AM, Chris O'Brien wrote:








    For what it's worth, from me, I think this would be pretty huge (coupled with the sightings object as well). As an analyst trying to identify useful data for my customers on large data sets, I'm interested in being able
    to produce top-level, automated assessments on data quality of feeds/dbs of stix data, and one of the ways that I'd suggest that a specific data point is of a 'high quality' is if it has multiple relationships and/or sightings. Add in to that the ability to
    rank producers, and even analytical assertion confidence, and you've got all the makings of a an algorithm for a heuristic grading scheme that could feed something even more awesome...like a machine learning project that can conduct threat pattern detection...
    As you say, Bret, this also gives scope for those relationships to have their own concept of 'quality' based on their related analytical assertions / confidence.

    I'd perhaps throw in to the discussion that it may not need to be a standalone object in its own right - we're currently experimenting with using the existing stix architecture relationships (with a little extra meta data) to achieve the desired effect, but
    it gets messy quickly and direct references to the relationships are by-way-of the object that they sit on (then you ask...which end of the relationship is the 'master' for that relationship, or must they both be updated when a change is made...what happens
    if one of them isn't in your namespace, etc, etc). Jimmy-rigging solutions to those issues feels feasible, but messy, prescriptive and makes anyone with a coding background have a little cry to themselves. It's something we're having to think about here at
    the moment - just wanted to mention that it's still possible and would be less impactful to existing deployments.

    Cheers,
    cob

    PS: If anyone else is looking in to this sort of heuristic / predictive / minority report-esque implementation, it'd be good to hear from you. If only to confirm that I'm not going completely insane.





  • 4.  Re: [cti-stix] Proposal - Top Level Relationship Object

    Posted 07-29-2015 22:40
    Re: "One comment, if you have no confidence in the accuracy of something, meaning you have not done any due diligence on your end, should you really be sharing it? Isn't this the whole problem with the Internet today? People spewing forth crap that is just wrong, and then it gets archived in Google as Gospel. " Sharing unfiltered, unvetted intelligence on Emerging Threats/Previously Unrecognized Threats is extremely valuable in many of the communities I participate in.  The critical element is to properly mark it.  For example one community uses "Investigating" to flag something as preliminary (say I've analyzed 100% 0Day APT Malware, and I run Strings on the binary and get 50 IP Addresses and Domains.  Yet the Malware was only observed to attempt communication with 6/50.  By sharing this type of intelligence [WITH CONTEXT] with the community others can be aware and say, Hey!!!  I didn't see the vectors you did, but I did see a different subset of 6 out of your 50.  We ran it in an air gapped sandbox and when the test access to Google.com failed the Malware beaconing switched to these different IPs and Ports.  Let's mark these 6 new IOCs as actionable and let everyone know the malware may behave differently in different environments and to keep an eye out for the other 38 IOCs." Capturing and retaining properly marked indicators has also revealed key discoveries years later:  for example: "Hey we were investigating something else and our search revealed APT Actor "X" was indeed using nameyourfavoritecommoditybotnet back in 2011!!!!  We didn't realize we had actionable indicators at the time.  Thanks for posting those informational Strings back in 2011!!!!! Filtering Intelligence will significantly impede detection of multi-Stage exploitation and variants of RATs deployed in the Entrenchment phase of lateral movement once adversary has established their initial beachhead and begins deploying.  The key is to ensure you convey all of the context you've developed (and "show your work" to back any of your assertions).   Understand in these assertions that, as always, other world views/use cases, methods are equally valid. Patrick Maroney President Integrated Networking Technologies, Inc. Desk: (856)983-0001 Cell: (609)841-5104 Email: pmaroney@specere.org On Wed, Jul 29, 2015 at 3:06 PM -0700, "Terry MacDonald" < terry.macdonald@threatloop.com > wrote: I was thinking back to the Admiralty Code ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Admiralty_code ) regarding reliability and credibility when I wrote that.  The idea was if someone had learned from a 3rd party that there was a relationship between Threat Group A and Threat Group B, but had not yet been able to determine the reliability/truthfulness of what that third party had said. They may want to send out that relationship, as kind of a 'something we've heard but not had a chance to verify ourselves'. That's where I was headed with the Unknown option. Maybe it would be better to use the terms from Information Reliability instead of Confidence when describing relationships within STIX? ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_source_and_information_reliability ) Rating Description 1 Confirmed Logical, consistent with other relevant information, confirmed by independent sources. 2 Probably true Logical, consistent with other relevant information, not confirmed. 3 Possibly true Reasonably logical, agrees with some relevant information, not confirmed. 4 Doubtfully true Not logical but possible, no other information on the subject, not confirmed. 5 Improbable Not logical, contradicted by other relevant information. 6 Cannot be judged The validity of the information can not be determined. Just a thought. Cheers Terry MacDonald STIX, TAXII, CybOX Consultant M: +61-407-203-026 E:  terry.macdonald@threatloop.com W:  www.threatloop.com 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 30 July 2015 at 07:12, Jason Keirstead < Jason.Keirstead@ca.ibm.com > wrote: What is the use case where someone is asserting something with no information behind it though? I am kind of lost on that. Why would it be being asserted? - Jason Keirstead Product Architect, Security Intelligence, IBM Security Systems www.ibm.com/security www.securityintelligence.com Without data, all you are is just another person with an opinion - Unknown Terry MacDonald ---2015/07/29 06:03:11 PM---I think there is a difference: 0 confidence = I have checked this information and I do not have any From: Terry MacDonald < terry.macdonald@threatloop.com > To: Jason Keirstead/CanEast/IBM@IBMCA Cc: "Wunder, John A." < jwunder@mitre.org >, Aharon Chernin < achernin@soltra.com >, "Baker, Jon" < bakerj@mitre.org >, "Jordan, Bret" < bret.jordan@bluecoat.com >, "Chris O'Brien" < COBrien@cert.gov.uk >, " cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org " < cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org >, JG on CTI-TC < jg@ctin.us > Date: 2015/07/29 06:03 PM Subject: Re: [cti-stix] Proposal - Top Level Relationship Object Sent by: < cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org > I think there is a difference: 0 confidence = I have checked this information and I do not have any faith that it is true. Unknown = There is no information to say if this is true or not true. We have no way to infer anything at present. --- I'd also say that there is the potential here for using something like the Admiralty code as a replacement for confidence..... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Admiralty_code : Reliability of Source A - Completely reliable B - Usually reliable C - Fairly reliable D - Not usually reliable E - Unreliable F - Reliability cannot be judged Accuracy of data (Credibility) 1 - Confirmed by other sources 2 - Probably True 3 - Possibly True 4 - Doubtful 5 - Improbable 6 - Truth cannot be judged Maybe that makes sense more so than Confidence? --- I also believe that we need to keep each relationship as a single direction relationship, to enable someone to discern a 'hierarchy' from the relationships they receive, rather than just a 'group' (as highlighted by others on the thread). If we combine all the relationships into a pool, we lose the ability of separating those relationships back out. I would like to keep the Source_ID and Target_ID separation. ID [1] [Required]: The ID of the relationship Version [ 1] [Required]: The version of the relationship; a simple number to be used with the ID for version control (instead of timestamp) Type [1] [Required]: The “type” of relationship being expressed.  (Not sure of how this works yet) Description [0..N] [Optional]: Words about the relationship. Source_ID [1] [Required] : The ID of one or more source entities in the relationship as a URI (not QName) Target_ID [1..N] [Required]: The ID of one or more targets in the relationship as a URI (not QName) Start_Time [0..1] [Required]: A timestamp in UTC stating when the relationship between the objects started, or the text 'unknown'. End_Time [0..1] [Required]: A timestamp in UTC stating when the relationship between the objects ended, or the text 'ongoing', or the text 'unknown'. Confidence [1] [Required]: A measure of confidence in the relationship.  (or should we look at Reliability/Credibility as discussed above?) Timestamp [0..1] [Required]: A timestamp in UTC stating when the relationship object was created.   Cheers Terry MacDonald STIX, TAXII, CybOX Consultant M: +61-407-203-026 E:  terry.macdonald@threatloop.com W:  www.threatloop.com 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 30 July 2015 at 05:25, Jason Keirstead < Jason.Keirstead@ca.ibm.com > wrote: Well... 0 would be exactly what it says... zero confidence, aka "no confidence". Is there a difference between "no confidence" and "unknown confidence"? To me they're the same thing... if you don't know, you don't know. - Jason Keirstead Product Architect, Security Intelligence, IBM Security Systems www.ibm.com/security www.securityintelligence.com Without data, all you are is just another person with an opinion - Unknown "Wunder, John A." ---2015/07/29 04:23:55 PM---I don't know, what does a confidence of 0 mean? To me the statement that the confidence is unknown i From: "Wunder, John A." < jwunder@mitre.org > To: Jason Keirstead/CanEast/IBM@IBMCA Cc: "Jordan, Bret" < bret.jordan@bluecoat.com >, Aharon Chernin < achernin@soltra.com >, "Baker, Jon" < bakerj@mitre.org >, JG on CTI-TC < jg@ctin.us >, "Chris O'Brien" < COBrien@cert.gov.uk >, " cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org " < cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org > Date: 2015/07/29 04:23 PM Subject: Re: [cti-stix] Proposal - Top Level Relationship Object I don't know, what does a confidence of 0 mean? To me the statement that the confidence is unknown is quite different from the statement that the confidence very low. From: < cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org > on behalf of Jason Keirstead Date: Wednesday, July 29, 2015 at 3:19 PM To: "Wunder, John A." Cc: "Jordan, Bret", Aharon Chernin, Jon Baker, JG on CTI-TC, Chris O'Brien, " cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org " Subject: Re: [cti-stix] Proposal - Top Level Relationship Object What is the difference between having confidence be optional or "unknown" and assigning a value of 0? - Jason Keirstead Product Architect, Security Intelligence, IBM Security Systems www.ibm.com/security www.securityintelligence.com Without data, all you are is just another person with an opinion - Unknown "Wunder, John A." ---2015/07/29 03:10:51 PM---I agree with you on reducing optionality but to me these "unknown" values are just hiding optionalit From: "Wunder, John A." < jwunder@mitre.org > To: "Jordan, Bret" < bret.jordan@bluecoat.com >, Aharon Chernin < achernin@soltra.com > Cc: "Baker, Jon" < bakerj@mitre.org >, JG on CTI-TC < jg@ctin.us >, "Chris O'Brien" < COBrien@cert.gov.uk >, " cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org " < cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org > Date: 2015/07/29 03:10 PM Subject: Re: [cti-stix] Proposal - Top Level Relationship Object Sent by: < cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org > I agree with you on reducing optionality but to me these "unknown" values are just hiding optionality rather than eliminating it. If anything it seems like having the field not present vs. a special "unknown" value is more obvious and explicit because it makes it clear that it's a special case. Otherwise you're going to have a lot of "if val == 'unknown'" code paths, and hardcoded strings with special meanings are bad. John From: "Jordan, Bret" Date: Wednesday, July 29, 2015 at 1:55 PM To: Aharon Chernin Cc: Jon Baker, "Wunder, John A.", JG on CTI-TC, Chris O'Brien, " cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org " Subject: Re: [cti-stix] Proposal - Top Level Relationship Object It has to be that way... Confidence has to be required, even if the the value is "unknown". We need to reduce the optionality and make code decision trees easier. Thanks, Bret Bret Jordan CISSP Director of Security Architecture and Standards Office of the CTO Blue Coat Systems PGP Fingerprint: 63B4 FC53 680A 6B7D 1447 F2C0 74F8 ACAE 7415 0050 "Without cryptography vihv vivc ce xhrnrw, however, the only thing that can not be unscrambled is an egg." On Jul 29, 2015, at 08:57, Aharon Chernin < achernin@soltra.com > wrote: Have you considered the case where an analyst wants to simply say that this collection of objects seems to be related? Wouldn't this just be a low confidence relationship? Aharon Chernin CTO SOLTRA An FS-ISAC & DTCC Company 18301 Bermuda green Dr Tampa, fl 33647 813.470.2173 achernin@soltra.com www.soltra.com From: cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org < cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org > on behalf of Baker, Jon < bakerj@mitre.org > Sent: Wednesday, July 29, 2015 8:37 AM To: Wunder, John A.; Jordan, Bret Cc: JG on CTI-TC; Chris O'Brien; cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org Subject: RE: [cti-stix] Proposal - Top Level Relationship Object John, Have you considered the case where an analyst wants to simply say that this collection of objects seems to be related? Imagine a case where you think that a bunch of things (incidents/observables/etc) are related, but you have not yet done the in depth analysis to understand the nature of their relationship. I had this sort of generic grouping of things in mind for a top level relationship object. In this case, I don’t think you could always have a From and To IDREF. You might just have a collection of IDREFs. Jon ============================================ Jonathan O. Baker J83D - Cyber Security Partnerships, Sharing, and Automation The MITRE Corporation Email: bakerj@mitre.org From: cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org [ mailto:cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org ] On Behalf Of Wunder, John A. Sent: Tuesday, July 28, 2015 4:15 PM To: Jordan, Bret < bret.jordan@bluecoat.com > Cc: JG on CTI-TC < jg@ctin.us >; Chris O'Brien < COBrien@cert.gov.uk >; cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org Subject: Re: [cti-stix] Proposal - Top Level Relationship Object Sure...personally I would do this, which is almost identical to what we do now (other than being at the top level rather than within an object): Relationship ID (for the relationship) [required] From IDREF [required] To IDREF [required] Relationship Qualifier [required] Confidence [optional] I'm undecided on whether information source information belongs in the STIX data model at all. By virtue of being in the data model it means someone is asserting it so it's impossible to verify. Digital signatures or something else out of the data model (relying on TAXII, etc.) seem like a better approach to me. But I don't have strong opinions on this and if we do include information source in the data model I would add that here. John From: "Jordan, Bret" Date: Tuesday, July 28, 2015 at 4:05 PM To: "Wunder, John A." Cc: JG on CTI-TC, Chris O'Brien, " cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org " Subject: Re: [cti-stix] Proposal - Top Level Relationship Object Great... Now we are discussing it... Please spell out what that would look like. Thanks, Bret Bret Jordan CISSP Director of Security Architecture and Standards Office of the CTO Blue Coat Systems PGP Fingerprint: 63B4 FC53 680A 6B7D 1447 F2C0 74F8 ACAE 7415 0050 "Without cryptography vihv vivc ce xhrnrw, however, the only thing that can not be unscrambled is an egg." On Jul 28, 2015, at 13:51, Wunder, John A. < jwunder@mitre.org > wrote: No directionality or description/qualifier? It seems like you want to be able to say *what* a relationship is describing and also which direction it goes in. I.e. TTP malware "is variant of" other TTP malware vs. TTP malware "is same as" other TTP malware given a different name by a different vendor From: < cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org > on behalf of "Jordan, Bret" Date: Tuesday, July 28, 2015 at 3:41 PM To: JG on CTI-TC Cc: Chris O'Brien, " cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org " Subject: Re: [cti-stix] Proposal - Top Level Relationship Object I see the relationship object being pretty simple and straight forward: Relationship IDREF (1-n) Source Confidence Thanks, Bret Bret Jordan CISSP Director of Security Architecture and Standards Office of the CTO Blue Coat Systems PGP Fingerprint: 63B4 FC53 680A 6B7D 1447 F2C0 74F8 ACAE 7415 0050 "Without cryptography vihv vivc ce xhrnrw, however, the only thing that can not be unscrambled is an egg." On Jul 28, 2015, at 13:16, JG on CTI-TC < jg@ctin.us > wrote: Chris: You are not going insane...we are all dealing with these same issues. Some of the more recent discussions (after you made this post) with respect to 'Sightings' seem to make a lot of sense to me...that is, to push the Sighting functionality further down in the data model...That is, down to the CybOX level... And I think we need to think about the Relationship object with respect to 'Communities of Interest'... For example, a malware research Community of Interest that is using Indicator, Observable, TTP and ExploitTarget may seek to express Relationships in a way that shows the Static and Behavioral characteristics of the malware (deep in the data model and at a very refined level of granularity) ...Whereas an Incident Response Community of Interest that is using Indicator, Incident and CourseOfAction may need the Relationship object defined in a separate way.... that is, one that is more tied to "actionable intelligence" which may then tie into ExploitTarget, ThreatActor, and Campaign...which then becomes of interest to a law enforcement Community of Interest. Of course... handling this may take us back into the debate on Profiles... Jane Ginn CTIN On 7/27/2015 3:44 AM, Chris O'Brien wrote: For what it's worth, from me, I think this would be pretty huge (coupled with the sightings object as well). As an analyst trying to identify useful data for my customers on large data sets, I'm interested in being able to produce top-level, automated assessments on data quality of feeds/dbs of stix data, and one of the ways that I'd suggest that a specific data point is of a 'high quality' is if it has multiple relationships and/or sightings. Add in to that the ability to rank producers, and even analytical assertion confidence, and you've got all the makings of a an algorithm for a heuristic grading scheme that could feed something even more awesome...like a machine learning project that can conduct threat pattern detection... As you say, Bret, this also gives scope for those relationships to have their own concept of 'quality' based on their related analytical assertions / confidence. I'd perhaps throw in to the discussion that it may not need to be a standalone object in its own right - we're currently experimenting with using the existing stix architecture relationships (with a little extra meta data) to achieve the desired effect, but it gets messy quickly and direct references to the relationships are by-way-of the object that they sit on (then you ask...which end of the relationship is the 'master' for that relationship, or must they both be updated when a change is made...what happens if one of them isn't in your namespace, etc, etc). Jimmy-rigging solutions to those issues feels feasible, but messy, prescriptive and makes anyone with a coding background have a little cry to themselves. It's something we're having to think about here at the moment - just wanted to mention that it's still possible and would be less impactful to existing deployments. Cheers, cob PS: If anyone else is looking in to this sort of heuristic / predictive / minority report-esque implementation, it'd be good to hear from you. If only to confirm that I'm not going completely insane.


  • 5.  Re: [cti-stix] Proposal - Top Level Relationship Object

    Posted 07-29-2015 22:58
    I will choose to argue that if you have any level of context, then by definition you have some level of Reliability / Confidence / or what ever end up calling it.   Thanks, Bret Bret Jordan CISSP Director of Security Architecture and Standards Office of the CTO Blue Coat Systems PGP Fingerprint: 63B4 FC53 680A 6B7D 1447  F2C0 74F8 ACAE 7415 0050 Without cryptography vihv vivc ce xhrnrw, however, the only thing that can not be unscrambled is an egg.   On Jul 29, 2015, at 16:39, Patrick Maroney < Pmaroney@Specere.org > wrote: Re: One comment, if you have no confidence in the accuracy of something, meaning you have not done any due diligence on your end, should you really be sharing it? Isn't this the whole problem with the Internet today? People spewing forth crap that is just wrong, and then it gets archived in Google as Gospel. Sharing unfiltered, unvetted intelligence on Emerging Threats/Previously Unrecognized Threats is extremely valuable in many of the communities I participate in.  The critical element is to properly mark it.  For example one community uses Investigating to flag something as preliminary (say I've analyzed 100% 0Day APT Malware, and I run Strings on the binary and get 50 IP Addresses and Domains.  Yet the Malware was only observed to attempt communication with 6/50.  By sharing this type of intelligence [WITH CONTEXT] with the community others can be aware and say, Hey!!!  I didn't see the vectors you did, but I did see a different subset of 6 out of your 50.  We ran it in an air gapped sandbox and when the test access to Google.com failed the Malware beaconing switched to these different IPs and Ports.  Let's mark these 6 new IOCs as actionable and let everyone know the malware may behave differently in different environments and to keep an eye out for the other 38 IOCs. Capturing and retaining properly marked indicators has also revealed key discoveries years later:  for example: Hey we were investigating something else and our search revealed APT Actor X was indeed using nameyourfavoritecommoditybotnet back in 2011!!!!  We didn't realize we had actionable indicators at the time.  Thanks for posting those informational Strings back in 2011!!!!! Filtering Intelligence will significantly impede detection of multi-Stage exploitation and variants of RATs deployed in the Entrenchment phase of lateral movement once adversary has established their initial beachhead and begins deploying.  The key is to ensure you convey all of the context you've developed (and show your work to back any of your assertions).   Understand in these assertions that, as always, other world views/use cases, methods are equally valid. Patrick Maroney President Integrated Networking Technologies, Inc. Desk: (856)983-0001 Cell: (609)841-5104 Email: pmaroney@specere.org On Wed, Jul 29, 2015 at 3:06 PM -0700, Terry MacDonald < terry.macdonald@threatloop.com > wrote: I was thinking back to the Admiralty Code ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Admiralty_code ) regarding reliability and credibility when I wrote that.  The idea was if someone had learned from a 3rd party that there was a relationship between Threat Group A and Threat Group B, but had not yet been able to determine the reliability/truthfulness of what that third party had said. They may want to send out that relationship, as kind of a 'something we've heard but not had a chance to verify ourselves'. That's where I was headed with the Unknown option. Maybe it would be better to use the terms from Information Reliability instead of Confidence when describing relationships within STIX? ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_source_and_information_reliability ) Rating Description 1 Confirmed Logical, consistent with other relevant information, confirmed by independent sources. 2 Probably true Logical, consistent with other relevant information, not confirmed. 3 Possibly true Reasonably logical, agrees with some relevant information, not confirmed. 4 Doubtfully true Not logical but possible, no other information on the subject, not confirmed. 5 Improbable Not logical, contradicted by other relevant information. 6 Cannot be judged The validity of the information can not be determined. Just a thought. Cheers Terry MacDonald STIX, TAXII, CybOX Consultant M: +61-407-203-026 E:  terry.macdonald@threatloop.com W:  www.threatloop.com 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 30 July 2015 at 07:12, Jason Keirstead < Jason.Keirstead@ca.ibm.com > wrote: What is the use case where someone is asserting something with no information behind it though? I am kind of lost on that. Why would it be being asserted? - Jason Keirstead Product Architect, Security Intelligence, IBM Security Systems www.ibm.com/security www.securityintelligence.com Without data, all you are is just another person with an opinion - Unknown <graycol.gif> Terry MacDonald ---2015/07/29 06:03:11 PM---I think there is a difference: 0 confidence = I have checked this information and I do not have any From: Terry MacDonald < terry.macdonald@threatloop.com > To: Jason Keirstead/CanEast/IBM@IBMCA Cc: Wunder, John A. < jwunder@mitre.org >, Aharon Chernin < achernin@soltra.com >, Baker, Jon < bakerj@mitre.org >, Jordan, Bret < bret.jordan@bluecoat.com >, Chris O'Brien < COBrien@cert.gov.uk >, cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org < cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org >, JG on CTI-TC < jg@ctin.us > Date: 2015/07/29 06:03 PM Subject: Re: [cti-stix] Proposal - Top Level Relationship Object Sent by: < cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org > I think there is a difference: 0 confidence = I have checked this information and I do not have any faith that it is true. Unknown = There is no information to say if this is true or not true. We have no way to infer anything at present. --- I'd also say that there is the potential here for using something like the Admiralty code as a replacement for confidence..... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Admiralty_code : Reliability of Source A - Completely reliable B - Usually reliable C - Fairly reliable D - Not usually reliable E - Unreliable F - Reliability cannot be judged Accuracy of data (Credibility) 1 - Confirmed by other sources 2 - Probably True 3 - Possibly True 4 - Doubtful 5 - Improbable 6 - Truth cannot be judged Maybe that makes sense more so than Confidence? --- I also believe that we need to keep each relationship as a single direction relationship, to enable someone to discern a 'hierarchy' from the relationships they receive, rather than just a 'group' (as highlighted by others on the thread). If we combine all the relationships into a pool, we lose the ability of separating those relationships back out. I would like to keep the Source_ID and Target_ID separation. ID [1] [Required]: The ID of the relationship Version [ 1] [Required]: The version of the relationship; a simple number to be used with the ID for version control (instead of timestamp) Type [1] [Required]: The “type” of relationship being expressed.  (Not sure of how this works yet) Description [0..N] [Optional]: Words about the relationship. Source_ID [1] [Required] : The ID of one or more source entities in the relationship as a URI (not QName) Target_ID [1..N] [Required]: The ID of one or more targets in the relationship as a URI (not QName) Start_Time [0..1] [Required]: A timestamp in UTC stating when the relationship between the objects started, or the text 'unknown'. End_Time [0..1] [Required]: A timestamp in UTC stating when the relationship between the objects ended, or the text 'ongoing', or the text 'unknown'. Confidence [1] [Required]: A measure of confidence in the relationship.  (or should we look at Reliability/Credibility as discussed above?) Timestamp [0..1] [Required]: A timestamp in UTC stating when the relationship object was created.   Cheers Terry MacDonald STIX, TAXII, CybOX Consultant M: +61-407-203-026 E:  terry.macdonald@threatloop.com W:  www.threatloop.com 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 30 July 2015 at 05:25, Jason Keirstead < Jason.Keirstead@ca.ibm.com > wrote: Well... 0 would be exactly what it says... zero confidence, aka no confidence . Is there a difference between no confidence and unknown confidence ? To me they're the same thing... if you don't know, you don't know. - Jason Keirstead Product Architect, Security Intelligence, IBM Security Systems www.ibm.com/security www.securityintelligence.com Without data, all you are is just another person with an opinion - Unknown <graycol.gif> Wunder, John A. ---2015/07/29 04:23:55 PM---I don't know, what does a confidence of 0 mean? To me the statement that the confidence is unknown i From: Wunder, John A. < jwunder@mitre.org > To: Jason Keirstead/CanEast/IBM@IBMCA Cc: Jordan, Bret < bret.jordan@bluecoat.com >, Aharon Chernin < achernin@soltra.com >, Baker, Jon < bakerj@mitre.org >, JG on CTI-TC < jg@ctin.us >, Chris O'Brien < COBrien@cert.gov.uk >, cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org < cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org > Date: 2015/07/29 04:23 PM Subject: Re: [cti-stix] Proposal - Top Level Relationship Object I don't know, what does a confidence of 0 mean? To me the statement that the confidence is unknown is quite different from the statement that the confidence very low. From: < cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org > on behalf of Jason Keirstead Date: Wednesday, July 29, 2015 at 3:19 PM To: Wunder, John A. Cc: Jordan, Bret , Aharon Chernin, Jon Baker, JG on CTI-TC, Chris O'Brien, cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org Subject: Re: [cti-stix] Proposal - Top Level Relationship Object What is the difference between having confidence be optional or unknown and assigning a value of 0? - Jason Keirstead Product Architect, Security Intelligence, IBM Security Systems www.ibm.com/security www.securityintelligence.com Without data, all you are is just another person with an opinion - Unknown <graycol.gif> Wunder, John A. ---2015/07/29 03:10:51 PM---I agree with you on reducing optionality but to me these unknown values are just hiding optionalit From: Wunder, John A. < jwunder@mitre.org > To: Jordan, Bret < bret.jordan@bluecoat.com >, Aharon Chernin < achernin@soltra.com > Cc: Baker, Jon < bakerj@mitre.org >, JG on CTI-TC < jg@ctin.us >, Chris O'Brien < COBrien@cert.gov.uk >, cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org < cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org > Date: 2015/07/29 03:10 PM Subject: Re: [cti-stix] Proposal - Top Level Relationship Object Sent by: < cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org > I agree with you on reducing optionality but to me these unknown values are just hiding optionality rather than eliminating it. If anything it seems like having the field not present vs. a special unknown value is more obvious and explicit because it makes it clear that it's a special case. Otherwise you're going to have a lot of if val == 'unknown' code paths, and hardcoded strings with special meanings are bad. John From: Jordan, Bret Date: Wednesday, July 29, 2015 at 1:55 PM To: Aharon Chernin Cc: Jon Baker, Wunder, John A. , JG on CTI-TC, Chris O'Brien, cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org Subject: Re: [cti-stix] Proposal - Top Level Relationship Object It has to be that way... Confidence has to be required, even if the the value is unknown . We need to reduce the optionality and make code decision trees easier. Thanks, Bret Bret Jordan CISSP Director of Security Architecture and Standards Office of the CTO Blue Coat Systems PGP Fingerprint: 63B4 FC53 680A 6B7D 1447 F2C0 74F8 ACAE 7415 0050 Without cryptography vihv vivc ce xhrnrw, however, the only thing that can not be unscrambled is an egg. On Jul 29, 2015, at 08:57, Aharon Chernin < achernin@soltra.com > wrote: Have you considered the case where an analyst wants to simply say that this collection of objects seems to be related? Wouldn't this just be a low confidence relationship? Aharon Chernin CTO SOLTRA An FS-ISAC & DTCC Company 18301 Bermuda green Dr Tampa, fl 33647 813.470.2173 achernin@soltra.com www.soltra.com From: cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org < cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org > on behalf of Baker, Jon < bakerj@mitre.org > Sent: Wednesday, July 29, 2015 8:37 AM To: Wunder, John A.; Jordan, Bret Cc: JG on CTI-TC; Chris O'Brien; cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org Subject: RE: [cti-stix] Proposal - Top Level Relationship Object John, Have you considered the case where an analyst wants to simply say that this collection of objects seems to be related? Imagine a case where you think that a bunch of things (incidents/observables/etc) are related, but you have not yet done the in depth analysis to understand the nature of their relationship. I had this sort of generic grouping of things in mind for a top level relationship object. In this case, I don’t think you could always have a From and To IDREF. You might just have a collection of IDREFs. Jon ============================================ Jonathan O. Baker J83D - Cyber Security Partnerships, Sharing, and Automation The MITRE Corporation Email: bakerj@mitre.org From: cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org [ mailto:cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org ] On Behalf Of Wunder, John A. Sent: Tuesday, July 28, 2015 4:15 PM To: Jordan, Bret < bret.jordan@bluecoat.com > Cc: JG on CTI-TC < jg@ctin.us >; Chris O'Brien < COBrien@cert.gov.uk >; cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org Subject: Re: [cti-stix] Proposal - Top Level Relationship Object Sure...personally I would do this, which is almost identical to what we do now (other than being at the top level rather than within an object): Relationship ID (for the relationship) [required] From IDREF [required] To IDREF [required] Relationship Qualifier [required] Confidence [optional] I'm undecided on whether information source information belongs in the STIX data model at all. By virtue of being in the data model it means someone is asserting it so it's impossible to verify. Digital signatures or something else out of the data model (relying on TAXII, etc.) seem like a better approach to me. But I don't have strong opinions on this and if we do include information source in the data model I would add that here. John From: Jordan, Bret Date: Tuesday, July 28, 2015 at 4:05 PM To: Wunder, John A. Cc: JG on CTI-TC, Chris O'Brien, cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org Subject: Re: [cti-stix] Proposal - Top Level Relationship Object Great... Now we are discussing it... Please spell out what that would look like. Thanks, Bret Bret Jordan CISSP Director of Security Architecture and Standards Office of the CTO Blue Coat Systems PGP Fingerprint: 63B4 FC53 680A 6B7D 1447 F2C0 74F8 ACAE 7415 0050 Without cryptography vihv vivc ce xhrnrw, however, the only thing that can not be unscrambled is an egg. On Jul 28, 2015, at 13:51, Wunder, John A. < jwunder@mitre.org > wrote: No directionality or description/qualifier? It seems like you want to be able to say *what* a relationship is describing and also which direction it goes in. I.e. TTP malware is variant of other TTP malware vs. TTP malware is same as other TTP malware given a different name by a different vendor From: < cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org > on behalf of Jordan, Bret Date: Tuesday, July 28, 2015 at 3:41 PM To: JG on CTI-TC Cc: Chris O'Brien, cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org Subject: Re: [cti-stix] Proposal - Top Level Relationship Object I see the relationship object being pretty simple and straight forward: Relationship IDREF (1-n) Source Confidence Thanks, Bret Bret Jordan CISSP Director of Security Architecture and Standards Office of the CTO Blue Coat Systems PGP Fingerprint: 63B4 FC53 680A 6B7D 1447 F2C0 74F8 ACAE 7415 0050 Without cryptography vihv vivc ce xhrnrw, however, the only thing that can not be unscrambled is an egg. On Jul 28, 2015, at 13:16, JG on CTI-TC < jg@ctin.us > wrote: Chris: You are not going insane...we are all dealing with these same issues. Some of the more recent discussions (after you made this post) with respect to 'Sightings' seem to make a lot of sense to me...that is, to push the Sighting functionality further down in the data model...That is, down to the CybOX level... And I think we need to think about the Relationship object with respect to 'Communities of Interest'... For example, a malware research Community of Interest that is using Indicator, Observable, TTP and ExploitTarget may seek to express Relationships in a way that shows the Static and Behavioral characteristics of the malware (deep in the data model and at a very refined level of granularity) ...Whereas an Incident Response Community of Interest that is using Indicator, Incident and CourseOfAction may need the Relationship object defined in a separate way.... that is, one that is more tied to actionable intelligence which may then tie into ExploitTarget, ThreatActor, and Campaign...which then becomes of interest to a law enforcement Community of Interest. Of course... handling this may take us back into the debate on Profiles... Jane Ginn CTIN On 7/27/2015 3:44 AM, Chris O'Brien wrote: For what it's worth, from me, I think this would be pretty huge (coupled with the sightings object as well). As an analyst trying to identify useful data for my customers on large data sets, I'm interested in being able to produce top-level, automated assessments on data quality of feeds/dbs of stix data, and one of the ways that I'd suggest that a specific data point is of a 'high quality' is if it has multiple relationships and/or sightings. Add in to that the ability to rank producers, and even analytical assertion confidence, and you've got all the makings of a an algorithm for a heuristic grading scheme that could feed something even more awesome...like a machine learning project that can conduct threat pattern detection... As you say, Bret, this also gives scope for those relationships to have their own concept of 'quality' based on their related analytical assertions / confidence. I'd perhaps throw in to the discussion that it may not need to be a standalone object in its own right - we're currently experimenting with using the existing stix architecture relationships (with a little extra meta data) to achieve the desired effect, but it gets messy quickly and direct references to the relationships are by-way-of the object that they sit on (then you ask...which end of the relationship is the 'master' for that relationship, or must they both be updated when a change is made...what happens if one of them isn't in your namespace, etc, etc). Jimmy-rigging solutions to those issues feels feasible, but messy, prescriptive and makes anyone with a coding background have a little cry to themselves. It's something we're having to think about here at the moment - just wanted to mention that it's still possible and would be less impactful to existing deployments. Cheers, cob PS: If anyone else is looking in to this sort of heuristic / predictive / minority report-esque implementation, it'd be good to hear from you. If only to confirm that I'm not going completely insane.


  • 6.  Re: [cti-stix] Proposal - Top Level Relationship Object

    Posted 07-30-2015 00:17
    Not necessarily Bret. It may be an 'hypothesis' that someone is wanting to share - to 'put it out there' to see if anyone agrees with it. Being able to mark something (using the Information reliability scale I posted earlier) as '3 - Possibly True' or '4 - Doubtfully True' then allows consumers to determine what level of confidence they want to assign to the information.  Ultimately each organization has its own criteria for determining what believes the truth to be. Information provided over STIX is just someones opinion. They are not facts (ok maybe some cybox objects are) but are reflections of conclusions that someone has decided upon. It's up to the consuming organization to decide what it thinks is the truth.  Consumers need to ask the following for each bit of information they receive: How reliable is the information source that gave me this data (source reliability) How reliable does the source think the data is (information reliability) In my opinion as a consumer I should be collecting everyone's opinions, hypotheses and guesses, no matter how mad - and making my own determination as to what I think. I should be crowdsourcing everyones opinions. All information is important in gaining insight even if it's seemingly nonsense at the time . The important thing is to give people a way of [+1] or [-1] on other people's relationships so that bad relationships are downvoted and become less important, and good relationships are upvoted and become more important. This will allow consumers to adjust what they think is true over time, and reflect the true nature of intelligence gathering - trying to make sense of rumour and gossip. It also will allow people over time to determine which organizations they should be listening to, and which ones they should ignore. Kind of like how stackoverflow does things :). Cheers Terry MacDonald STIX, TAXII, CybOX Consultant M: +61-407-203-026 E:  terry.macdonald@threatloop.com W:  www.threatloop.com 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 30 July 2015 at 08:57, Jordan, Bret < bret.jordan@bluecoat.com > wrote: I will choose to argue that if you have any level of context, then by definition you have some level of Reliability / Confidence / or what ever end up calling it.   Thanks, Bret Bret Jordan CISSP Director of Security Architecture and Standards Office of the CTO Blue Coat Systems PGP Fingerprint: 63B4 FC53 680A 6B7D 1447  F2C0 74F8 ACAE 7415 0050 "Without cryptography vihv vivc ce xhrnrw, however, the only thing that can not be unscrambled is an egg."  On Jul 29, 2015, at 16:39, Patrick Maroney < Pmaroney@Specere.org > wrote: Re: "One comment, if you have no confidence in the accuracy of something, meaning you have not done any due diligence on your end, should you really be sharing it? Isn't this the whole problem with the Internet today? People spewing forth crap that is just wrong, and then it gets archived in Google as Gospel. " Sharing unfiltered, unvetted intelligence on Emerging Threats/Previously Unrecognized Threats is extremely valuable in many of the communities I participate in.  The critical element is to properly mark it.  For example one community uses "Investigating" to flag something as preliminary (say I've analyzed 100% 0Day APT Malware, and I run Strings on the binary and get 50 IP Addresses and Domains.  Yet the Malware was only observed to attempt communication with 6/50.  By sharing this type of intelligence [WITH CONTEXT] with the community others can be aware and say, Hey!!!  I didn't see the vectors you did, but I did see a different subset of 6 out of your 50.  We ran it in an air gapped sandbox and when the test access to Google.com failed the Malware beaconing switched to these different IPs and Ports.  Let's mark these 6 new IOCs as actionable and let everyone know the malware may behave differently in different environments and to keep an eye out for the other 38 IOCs." Capturing and retaining properly marked indicators has also revealed key discoveries years later:  for example: "Hey we were investigating something else and our search revealed APT Actor "X" was indeed using nameyourfavoritecommoditybotnet back in 2011!!!!  We didn't realize we had actionable indicators at the time.  Thanks for posting those informational Strings back in 2011!!!!! Filtering Intelligence will significantly impede detection of multi-Stage exploitation and variants of RATs deployed in the Entrenchment phase of lateral movement once adversary has established their initial beachhead and begins deploying.  The key is to ensure you convey all of the context you've developed (and "show your work" to back any of your assertions).   Understand in these assertions that, as always, other world views/use cases, methods are equally valid. Patrick Maroney President Integrated Networking Technologies, Inc. Desk: (856)983-0001 Cell: (609)841-5104 Email: pmaroney@specere.org On Wed, Jul 29, 2015 at 3:06 PM -0700, "Terry MacDonald" < terry.macdonald@threatloop.com > wrote: I was thinking back to the Admiralty Code ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Admiralty_code ) regarding reliability and credibility when I wrote that.  The idea was if someone had learned from a 3rd party that there was a relationship between Threat Group A and Threat Group B, but had not yet been able to determine the reliability/truthfulness of what that third party had said. They may want to send out that relationship, as kind of a 'something we've heard but not had a chance to verify ourselves'. That's where I was headed with the Unknown option. Maybe it would be better to use the terms from Information Reliability instead of Confidence when describing relationships within STIX? ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_source_and_information_reliability ) Rating Description 1 Confirmed Logical, consistent with other relevant information, confirmed by independent sources. 2 Probably true Logical, consistent with other relevant information, not confirmed. 3 Possibly true Reasonably logical, agrees with some relevant information, not confirmed. 4 Doubtfully true Not logical but possible, no other information on the subject, not confirmed. 5 Improbable Not logical, contradicted by other relevant information. 6 Cannot be judged The validity of the information can not be determined. Just a thought. Cheers Terry MacDonald STIX, TAXII, CybOX Consultant M: +61-407-203-026 E:  terry.macdonald@threatloop.com W:  www.threatloop.com 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 30 July 2015 at 07:12, Jason Keirstead < Jason.Keirstead@ca.ibm.com > wrote: What is the use case where someone is asserting something with no information behind it though? I am kind of lost on that. Why would it be being asserted? - Jason Keirstead Product Architect, Security Intelligence, IBM Security Systems www.ibm.com/security www.securityintelligence.com Without data, all you are is just another person with an opinion - Unknown <graycol.gif> Terry MacDonald ---2015/07/29 06:03:11 PM---I think there is a difference: 0 confidence = I have checked this information and I do not have any From: Terry MacDonald < terry.macdonald@threatloop.com > To: Jason Keirstead/CanEast/IBM@IBMCA Cc: "Wunder, John A." < jwunder@mitre.org >, Aharon Chernin < achernin@soltra.com >, "Baker, Jon" < bakerj@mitre.org >, "Jordan, Bret" < bret.jordan@bluecoat.com >, "Chris O'Brien" < COBrien@cert.gov.uk >, " cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org " < cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org >, JG on CTI-TC < jg@ctin.us > Date: 2015/07/29 06:03 PM Subject: Re: [cti-stix] Proposal - Top Level Relationship Object Sent by: < cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org > I think there is a difference: 0 confidence = I have checked this information and I do not have any faith that it is true. Unknown = There is no information to say if this is true or not true. We have no way to infer anything at present. --- I'd also say that there is the potential here for using something like the Admiralty code as a replacement for confidence..... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Admiralty_code : Reliability of Source A - Completely reliable B - Usually reliable C - Fairly reliable D - Not usually reliable E - Unreliable F - Reliability cannot be judged Accuracy of data (Credibility) 1 - Confirmed by other sources 2 - Probably True 3 - Possibly True 4 - Doubtful 5 - Improbable 6 - Truth cannot be judged Maybe that makes sense more so than Confidence? --- I also believe that we need to keep each relationship as a single direction relationship, to enable someone to discern a 'hierarchy' from the relationships they receive, rather than just a 'group' (as highlighted by others on the thread). If we combine all the relationships into a pool, we lose the ability of separating those relationships back out. I would like to keep the Source_ID and Target_ID separation. ID [1] [Required]: The ID of the relationship Version [ 1] [Required]: The version of the relationship; a simple number to be used with the ID for version control (instead of timestamp) Type [1] [Required]: The “type” of relationship being expressed.  (Not sure of how this works yet) Description [0..N] [Optional]: Words about the relationship. Source_ID [1] [Required] : The ID of one or more source entities in the relationship as a URI (not QName) Target_ID [1..N] [Required]: The ID of one or more targets in the relationship as a URI (not QName) Start_Time [0..1] [Required]: A timestamp in UTC stating when the relationship between the objects started, or the text 'unknown'. End_Time [0..1] [Required]: A timestamp in UTC stating when the relationship between the objects ended, or the text 'ongoing', or the text 'unknown'. Confidence [1] [Required]: A measure of confidence in the relationship.  (or should we look at Reliability/Credibility as discussed above?) Timestamp [0..1] [Required]: A timestamp in UTC stating when the relationship object was created.   Cheers Terry MacDonald STIX, TAXII, CybOX Consultant M: +61-407-203-026 E:  terry.macdonald@threatloop.com W:  www.threatloop.com 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 30 July 2015 at 05:25, Jason Keirstead < Jason.Keirstead@ca.ibm.com > wrote: Well... 0 would be exactly what it says... zero confidence, aka "no confidence". Is there a difference between "no confidence" and "unknown confidence"? To me they're the same thing... if you don't know, you don't know. - Jason Keirstead Product Architect, Security Intelligence, IBM Security Systems www.ibm.com/security www.securityintelligence.com Without data, all you are is just another person with an opinion - Unknown <graycol.gif> "Wunder, John A." ---2015/07/29 04:23:55 PM---I don't know, what does a confidence of 0 mean? To me the statement that the confidence is unknown i From: "Wunder, John A." < jwunder@mitre.org > To: Jason Keirstead/CanEast/IBM@IBMCA Cc: "Jordan, Bret" < bret.jordan@bluecoat.com >, Aharon Chernin < achernin@soltra.com >, "Baker, Jon" < bakerj@mitre.org >, JG on CTI-TC < jg@ctin.us >, "Chris O'Brien" < COBrien@cert.gov.uk >, " cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org " < cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org > Date: 2015/07/29 04:23 PM Subject: Re: [cti-stix] Proposal - Top Level Relationship Object I don't know, what does a confidence of 0 mean? To me the statement that the confidence is unknown is quite different from the statement that the confidence very low. From: < cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org > on behalf of Jason Keirstead Date: Wednesday, July 29, 2015 at 3:19 PM To: "Wunder, John A." Cc: "Jordan, Bret", Aharon Chernin, Jon Baker, JG on CTI-TC, Chris O'Brien, " cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org " Subject: Re: [cti-stix] Proposal - Top Level Relationship Object What is the difference between having confidence be optional or "unknown" and assigning a value of 0? - Jason Keirstead Product Architect, Security Intelligence, IBM Security Systems www.ibm.com/security www.securityintelligence.com Without data, all you are is just another person with an opinion - Unknown <graycol.gif> "Wunder, John A." ---2015/07/29 03:10:51 PM---I agree with you on reducing optionality but to me these "unknown" values are just hiding optionalit From: "Wunder, John A." < jwunder@mitre.org > To: "Jordan, Bret" < bret.jordan@bluecoat.com >, Aharon Chernin < achernin@soltra.com > Cc: "Baker, Jon" < bakerj@mitre.org >, JG on CTI-TC < jg@ctin.us >, "Chris O'Brien" < COBrien@cert.gov.uk >, " cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org " < cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org > Date: 2015/07/29 03:10 PM Subject: Re: [cti-stix] Proposal - Top Level Relationship Object Sent by: < cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org > I agree with you on reducing optionality but to me these "unknown" values are just hiding optionality rather than eliminating it. If anything it seems like having the field not present vs. a special "unknown" value is more obvious and explicit because it makes it clear that it's a special case. Otherwise you're going to have a lot of "if val == 'unknown'" code paths, and hardcoded strings with special meanings are bad. John From: "Jordan, Bret" Date: Wednesday, July 29, 2015 at 1:55 PM To: Aharon Chernin Cc: Jon Baker, "Wunder, John A.", JG on CTI-TC, Chris O'Brien, " cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org " Subject: Re: [cti-stix] Proposal - Top Level Relationship Object It has to be that way... Confidence has to be required, even if the the value is "unknown". We need to reduce the optionality and make code decision trees easier. Thanks, Bret Bret Jordan CISSP Director of Security Architecture and Standards Office of the CTO Blue Coat Systems PGP Fingerprint: 63B4 FC53 680A 6B7D 1447 F2C0 74F8 ACAE 7415 0050 "Without cryptography vihv vivc ce xhrnrw, however, the only thing that can not be unscrambled is an egg." On Jul 29, 2015, at 08:57, Aharon Chernin < achernin@soltra.com > wrote: Have you considered the case where an analyst wants to simply say that this collection of objects seems to be related? Wouldn't this just be a low confidence relationship? Aharon Chernin CTO SOLTRA An FS-ISAC & DTCC Company 18301 Bermuda green Dr Tampa, fl 33647 813.470.2173 achernin@soltra.com www.soltra.com From: cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org < cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org > on behalf of Baker, Jon < bakerj@mitre.org > Sent: Wednesday, July 29, 2015 8:37 AM To: Wunder, John A.; Jordan, Bret Cc: JG on CTI-TC; Chris O'Brien; cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org Subject: RE: [cti-stix] Proposal - Top Level Relationship Object John, Have you considered the case where an analyst wants to simply say that this collection of objects seems to be related? Imagine a case where you think that a bunch of things (incidents/observables/etc) are related, but you have not yet done the in depth analysis to understand the nature of their relationship. I had this sort of generic grouping of things in mind for a top level relationship object. In this case, I don’t think you could always have a From and To IDREF. You might just have a collection of IDREFs. Jon ============================================ Jonathan O. Baker J83D - Cyber Security Partnerships, Sharing, and Automation The MITRE Corporation Email: bakerj@mitre.org From: cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org [ mailto:cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org ] On Behalf Of Wunder, John A. Sent: Tuesday, July 28, 2015 4:15 PM To: Jordan, Bret < bret.jordan@bluecoat.com > Cc: JG on CTI-TC < jg@ctin.us >; Chris O'Brien < COBrien@cert.gov.uk >; cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org Subject: Re: [cti-stix] Proposal - Top Level Relationship Object Sure...personally I would do this, which is almost identical to what we do now (other than being at the top level rather than within an object): Relationship ID (for the relationship) [required] From IDREF [required] To IDREF [required] Relationship Qualifier [required] Confidence [optional] I'm undecided on whether information source information belongs in the STIX data model at all. By virtue of being in the data model it means someone is asserting it so it's impossible to verify. Digital signatures or something else out of the data model (relying on TAXII, etc.) seem like a better approach to me. But I don't have strong opinions on this and if we do include information source in the data model I would add that here. John From: "Jordan, Bret" Date: Tuesday, July 28, 2015 at 4:05 PM To: "Wunder, John A." Cc: JG on CTI-TC, Chris O'Brien, " cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org " Subject: Re: [cti-stix] Proposal - Top Level Relationship Object Great... Now we are discussing it... Please spell out what that would look like. Thanks, Bret Bret Jordan CISSP Director of Security Architecture and Standards Office of the CTO Blue Coat Systems PGP Fingerprint: 63B4 FC53 680A 6B7D 1447 F2C0 74F8 ACAE 7415 0050 "Without cryptography vihv vivc ce xhrnrw, however, the only thing that can not be unscrambled is an egg." On Jul 28, 2015, at 13:51, Wunder, John A. < jwunder@mitre.org > wrote: No directionality or description/qualifier? It seems like you want to be able to say *what* a relationship is describing and also which direction it goes in. I.e. TTP malware "is variant of" other TTP malware vs. TTP malware "is same as" other TTP malware given a different name by a different vendor From: < cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org > on behalf of "Jordan, Bret" Date: Tuesday, July 28, 2015 at 3:41 PM To: JG on CTI-TC Cc: Chris O'Brien, " cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org " Subject: Re: [cti-stix] Proposal - Top Level Relationship Object I see the relationship object being pretty simple and straight forward: Relationship IDREF (1-n) Source Confidence Thanks, Bret Bret Jordan CISSP Director of Security Architecture and Standards Office of the CTO Blue Coat Systems PGP Fingerprint: 63B4 FC53 680A 6B7D 1447 F2C0 74F8 ACAE 7415 0050 "Without cryptography vihv vivc ce xhrnrw, however, the only thing that can not be unscrambled is an egg." On Jul 28, 2015, at 13:16, JG on CTI-TC < jg@ctin.us > wrote: Chris: You are not going insane...we are all dealing with these same issues. Some of the more recent discussions (after you made this post) with respect to 'Sightings' seem to make a lot of sense to me...that is, to push the Sighting functionality further down in the data model...That is, down to the CybOX level... And I think we need to think about the Relationship object with respect to 'Communities of Interest'... For example, a malware research Community of Interest that is using Indicator, Observable, TTP and ExploitTarget may seek to express Relationships in a way that shows the Static and Behavioral characteristics of the malware (deep in the data model and at a very refined level of granularity) ...Whereas an Incident Response Community of Interest that is using Indicator, Incident and CourseOfAction may need the Relationship object defined in a separate way.... that is, one that is more tied to "actionable intelligence" which may then tie into ExploitTarget, ThreatActor, and Campaign...which then becomes of interest to a law enforcement Community of Interest. Of course... handling this may take us back into the debate on Profiles... Jane Ginn CTIN On 7/27/2015 3:44 AM, Chris O'Brien wrote: For what it's worth, from me, I think this would be pretty huge (coupled with the sightings object as well). As an analyst trying to identify useful data for my customers on large data sets, I'm interested in being able to produce top-level, automated assessments on data quality of feeds/dbs of stix data, and one of the ways that I'd suggest that a specific data point is of a 'high quality' is if it has multiple relationships and/or sightings. Add in to that the ability to rank producers, and even analytical assertion confidence, and you've got all the makings of a an algorithm for a heuristic grading scheme that could feed something even more awesome...like a machine learning project that can conduct threat pattern detection... As you say, Bret, this also gives scope for those relationships to have their own concept of 'quality' based on their related analytical assertions / confidence. I'd perhaps throw in to the discussion that it may not need to be a standalone object in its own right - we're currently experimenting with using the existing stix architecture relationships (with a little extra meta data) to achieve the desired effect, but it gets messy quickly and direct references to the relationships are by-way-of the object that they sit on (then you ask...which end of the relationship is the 'master' for that relationship, or must they both be updated when a change is made...what happens if one of them isn't in your namespace, etc, etc). Jimmy-rigging solutions to those issues feels feasible, but messy, prescriptive and makes anyone with a coding background have a little cry to themselves. It's something we're having to think about here at the moment - just wanted to mention that it's still possible and would be less impactful to existing deployments. Cheers, cob PS: If anyone else is looking in to this sort of heuristic / predictive / minority report-esque implementation, it'd be good to hear from you. If only to confirm that I'm not going completely insane.


  • 7.  Re: [cti-stix] Proposal - Top Level Relationship Object

    Posted 07-30-2015 03:56
    I can agree with that...  Thanks for helping me see the light Thanks, Bret Bret Jordan CISSP Director of Security Architecture and Standards Office of the CTO Blue Coat Systems PGP Fingerprint: 63B4 FC53 680A 6B7D 1447  F2C0 74F8 ACAE 7415 0050 Without cryptography vihv vivc ce xhrnrw, however, the only thing that can not be unscrambled is an egg.   On Jul 29, 2015, at 18:16, Terry MacDonald < terry.macdonald@threatloop.com > wrote: Not necessarily Bret. It may be an 'hypothesis' that someone is wanting to share - to 'put it out there' to see if anyone agrees with it. Being able to mark something (using the Information reliability scale I posted earlier) as '3 - Possibly True' or '4 - Doubtfully True' then allows consumers to determine what level of confidence they want to assign to the information.  Ultimately each organization has its own criteria for determining what believes the truth to be. Information provided over STIX is just someones opinion. They are not facts (ok maybe some cybox objects are) but are reflections of conclusions that someone has decided upon. It's up to the consuming organization to decide what it thinks is the truth.  Consumers need to ask the following for each bit of information they receive: How reliable is the information source that gave me this data (source reliability) How reliable does the source think the data is (information reliability) In my opinion as a consumer I should be collecting everyone's opinions, hypotheses and guesses, no matter how mad - and making my own determination as to what I think. I should be crowdsourcing everyones opinions. All information is important in gaining insight even if it's seemingly nonsense at the time . The important thing is to give people a way of [+1] or [-1] on other people's relationships so that bad relationships are downvoted and become less important, and good relationships are upvoted and become more important. This will allow consumers to adjust what they think is true over time, and reflect the true nature of intelligence gathering - trying to make sense of rumour and gossip. It also will allow people over time to determine which organizations they should be listening to, and which ones they should ignore. Kind of like how stackoverflow does things :). Cheers Terry MacDonald STIX, TAXII, CybOX Consultant M: +61-407-203-026 E:  terry.macdonald@threatloop.com W:  www.threatloop.com 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 30 July 2015 at 08:57, Jordan, Bret < bret.jordan@bluecoat.com > wrote: I will choose to argue that if you have any level of context, then by definition you have some level of Reliability / Confidence / or what ever end up calling it.   Thanks, Bret Bret Jordan CISSP Director of Security Architecture and Standards Office of the CTO Blue Coat Systems PGP Fingerprint: 63B4 FC53 680A 6B7D 1447  F2C0 74F8 ACAE 7415 0050 Without cryptography vihv vivc ce xhrnrw, however, the only thing that can not be unscrambled is an egg.   On Jul 29, 2015, at 16:39, Patrick Maroney < Pmaroney@Specere.org > wrote: Re: One comment, if you have no confidence in the accuracy of something, meaning you have not done any due diligence on your end, should you really be sharing it? Isn't this the whole problem with the Internet today? People spewing forth crap that is just wrong, and then it gets archived in Google as Gospel. Sharing unfiltered, unvetted intelligence on Emerging Threats/Previously Unrecognized Threats is extremely valuable in many of the communities I participate in.  The critical element is to properly mark it.  For example one community uses Investigating to flag something as preliminary (say I've analyzed 100% 0Day APT Malware, and I run Strings on the binary and get 50 IP Addresses and Domains.  Yet the Malware was only observed to attempt communication with 6/50.  By sharing this type of intelligence [WITH CONTEXT] with the community others can be aware and say, Hey!!!  I didn't see the vectors you did, but I did see a different subset of 6 out of your 50.  We ran it in an air gapped sandbox and when the test access to Google.com failed the Malware beaconing switched to these different IPs and Ports.  Let's mark these 6 new IOCs as actionable and let everyone know the malware may behave differently in different environments and to keep an eye out for the other 38 IOCs. Capturing and retaining properly marked indicators has also revealed key discoveries years later:  for example: Hey we were investigating something else and our search revealed APT Actor X was indeed using nameyourfavoritecommoditybotnet back in 2011!!!!  We didn't realize we had actionable indicators at the time.  Thanks for posting those informational Strings back in 2011!!!!! Filtering Intelligence will significantly impede detection of multi-Stage exploitation and variants of RATs deployed in the Entrenchment phase of lateral movement once adversary has established their initial beachhead and begins deploying.  The key is to ensure you convey all of the context you've developed (and show your work to back any of your assertions).   Understand in these assertions that, as always, other world views/use cases, methods are equally valid. Patrick Maroney President Integrated Networking Technologies, Inc. Desk: (856)983-0001 Cell: (609)841-5104 Email: pmaroney@specere.org On Wed, Jul 29, 2015 at 3:06 PM -0700, Terry MacDonald < terry.macdonald@threatloop.com > wrote: I was thinking back to the Admiralty Code ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Admiralty_code ) regarding reliability and credibility when I wrote that.  The idea was if someone had learned from a 3rd party that there was a relationship between Threat Group A and Threat Group B, but had not yet been able to determine the reliability/truthfulness of what that third party had said. They may want to send out that relationship, as kind of a 'something we've heard but not had a chance to verify ourselves'. That's where I was headed with the Unknown option. Maybe it would be better to use the terms from Information Reliability instead of Confidence when describing relationships within STIX? ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_source_and_information_reliability ) Rating Description 1 Confirmed Logical, consistent with other relevant information, confirmed by independent sources. 2 Probably true Logical, consistent with other relevant information, not confirmed. 3 Possibly true Reasonably logical, agrees with some relevant information, not confirmed. 4 Doubtfully true Not logical but possible, no other information on the subject, not confirmed. 5 Improbable Not logical, contradicted by other relevant information. 6 Cannot be judged The validity of the information can not be determined. Just a thought. Cheers Terry MacDonald STIX, TAXII, CybOX Consultant M: +61-407-203-026 E:  terry.macdonald@threatloop.com W:  www.threatloop.com 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 30 July 2015 at 07:12, Jason Keirstead < Jason.Keirstead@ca.ibm.com > wrote: What is the use case where someone is asserting something with no information behind it though? I am kind of lost on that. Why would it be being asserted? - Jason Keirstead Product Architect, Security Intelligence, IBM Security Systems www.ibm.com/security www.securityintelligence.com Without data, all you are is just another person with an opinion - Unknown <graycol.gif> Terry MacDonald ---2015/07/29 06:03:11 PM---I think there is a difference: 0 confidence = I have checked this information and I do not have any From: Terry MacDonald < terry.macdonald@threatloop.com > To: Jason Keirstead/CanEast/IBM@IBMCA Cc: Wunder, John A. < jwunder@mitre.org >, Aharon Chernin < achernin@soltra.com >, Baker, Jon < bakerj@mitre.org >, Jordan, Bret < bret.jordan@bluecoat.com >, Chris O'Brien < COBrien@cert.gov.uk >, cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org < cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org >, JG on CTI-TC < jg@ctin.us > Date: 2015/07/29 06:03 PM Subject: Re: [cti-stix] Proposal - Top Level Relationship Object Sent by: < cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org > I think there is a difference: 0 confidence = I have checked this information and I do not have any faith that it is true. Unknown = There is no information to say if this is true or not true. We have no way to infer anything at present. --- I'd also say that there is the potential here for using something like the Admiralty code as a replacement for confidence..... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Admiralty_code : Reliability of Source A - Completely reliable B - Usually reliable C - Fairly reliable D - Not usually reliable E - Unreliable F - Reliability cannot be judged Accuracy of data (Credibility) 1 - Confirmed by other sources 2 - Probably True 3 - Possibly True 4 - Doubtful 5 - Improbable 6 - Truth cannot be judged Maybe that makes sense more so than Confidence? --- I also believe that we need to keep each relationship as a single direction relationship, to enable someone to discern a 'hierarchy' from the relationships they receive, rather than just a 'group' (as highlighted by others on the thread). If we combine all the relationships into a pool, we lose the ability of separating those relationships back out. I would like to keep the Source_ID and Target_ID separation. ID [1] [Required]: The ID of the relationship Version [ 1] [Required]: The version of the relationship; a simple number to be used with the ID for version control (instead of timestamp) Type [1] [Required]: The “type” of relationship being expressed.  (Not sure of how this works yet) Description [0..N] [Optional]: Words about the relationship. Source_ID [1] [Required] : The ID of one or more source entities in the relationship as a URI (not QName) Target_ID [1..N] [Required]: The ID of one or more targets in the relationship as a URI (not QName) Start_Time [0..1] [Required]: A timestamp in UTC stating when the relationship between the objects started, or the text 'unknown'. End_Time [0..1] [Required]: A timestamp in UTC stating when the relationship between the objects ended, or the text 'ongoing', or the text 'unknown'. Confidence [1] [Required]: A measure of confidence in the relationship.  (or should we look at Reliability/Credibility as discussed above?) Timestamp [0..1] [Required]: A timestamp in UTC stating when the relationship object was created.   Cheers Terry MacDonald STIX, TAXII, CybOX Consultant M: +61-407-203-026 E:  terry.macdonald@threatloop.com W:  www.threatloop.com 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 30 July 2015 at 05:25, Jason Keirstead < Jason.Keirstead@ca.ibm.com > wrote: Well... 0 would be exactly what it says... zero confidence, aka no confidence . Is there a difference between no confidence and unknown confidence ? To me they're the same thing... if you don't know, you don't know. - Jason Keirstead Product Architect, Security Intelligence, IBM Security Systems www.ibm.com/security www.securityintelligence.com Without data, all you are is just another person with an opinion - Unknown <graycol.gif> Wunder, John A. ---2015/07/29 04:23:55 PM---I don't know, what does a confidence of 0 mean? To me the statement that the confidence is unknown i From: Wunder, John A. < jwunder@mitre.org > To: Jason Keirstead/CanEast/IBM@IBMCA Cc: Jordan, Bret < bret.jordan@bluecoat.com >, Aharon Chernin < achernin@soltra.com >, Baker, Jon < bakerj@mitre.org >, JG on CTI-TC < jg@ctin.us >, Chris O'Brien < COBrien@cert.gov.uk >, cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org < cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org > Date: 2015/07/29 04:23 PM Subject: Re: [cti-stix] Proposal - Top Level Relationship Object I don't know, what does a confidence of 0 mean? To me the statement that the confidence is unknown is quite different from the statement that the confidence very low. From: < cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org > on behalf of Jason Keirstead Date: Wednesday, July 29, 2015 at 3:19 PM To: Wunder, John A. Cc: Jordan, Bret , Aharon Chernin, Jon Baker, JG on CTI-TC, Chris O'Brien, cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org Subject: Re: [cti-stix] Proposal - Top Level Relationship Object What is the difference between having confidence be optional or unknown and assigning a value of 0? - Jason Keirstead Product Architect, Security Intelligence, IBM Security Systems www.ibm.com/security www.securityintelligence.com Without data, all you are is just another person with an opinion - Unknown <graycol.gif> Wunder, John A. ---2015/07/29 03:10:51 PM---I agree with you on reducing optionality but to me these unknown values are just hiding optionalit From: Wunder, John A. < jwunder@mitre.org > To: Jordan, Bret < bret.jordan@bluecoat.com >, Aharon Chernin < achernin@soltra.com > Cc: Baker, Jon < bakerj@mitre.org >, JG on CTI-TC < jg@ctin.us >, Chris O'Brien < COBrien@cert.gov.uk >, cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org < cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org > Date: 2015/07/29 03:10 PM Subject: Re: [cti-stix] Proposal - Top Level Relationship Object Sent by: < cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org > I agree with you on reducing optionality but to me these unknown values are just hiding optionality rather than eliminating it. If anything it seems like having the field not present vs. a special unknown value is more obvious and explicit because it makes it clear that it's a special case. Otherwise you're going to have a lot of if val == 'unknown' code paths, and hardcoded strings with special meanings are bad. John From: Jordan, Bret Date: Wednesday, July 29, 2015 at 1:55 PM To: Aharon Chernin Cc: Jon Baker, Wunder, John A. , JG on CTI-TC, Chris O'Brien, cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org Subject: Re: [cti-stix] Proposal - Top Level Relationship Object It has to be that way... Confidence has to be required, even if the the value is unknown . We need to reduce the optionality and make code decision trees easier. Thanks, Bret Bret Jordan CISSP Director of Security Architecture and Standards Office of the CTO Blue Coat Systems PGP Fingerprint: 63B4 FC53 680A 6B7D 1447 F2C0 74F8 ACAE 7415 0050 Without cryptography vihv vivc ce xhrnrw, however, the only thing that can not be unscrambled is an egg. On Jul 29, 2015, at 08:57, Aharon Chernin < achernin@soltra.com > wrote: Have you considered the case where an analyst wants to simply say that this collection of objects seems to be related? Wouldn't this just be a low confidence relationship? Aharon Chernin CTO SOLTRA An FS-ISAC & DTCC Company 18301 Bermuda green Dr Tampa, fl 33647 813.470.2173 achernin@soltra.com www.soltra.com From: cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org < cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org > on behalf of Baker, Jon < bakerj@mitre.org > Sent: Wednesday, July 29, 2015 8:37 AM To: Wunder, John A.; Jordan, Bret Cc: JG on CTI-TC; Chris O'Brien; cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org Subject: RE: [cti-stix] Proposal - Top Level Relationship Object John, Have you considered the case where an analyst wants to simply say that this collection of objects seems to be related? Imagine a case where you think that a bunch of things (incidents/observables/etc) are related, but you have not yet done the in depth analysis to understand the nature of their relationship. I had this sort of generic grouping of things in mind for a top level relationship object. In this case, I don’t think you could always have a From and To IDREF. You might just have a collection of IDREFs. Jon ============================================ Jonathan O. Baker J83D - Cyber Security Partnerships, Sharing, and Automation The MITRE Corporation Email: bakerj@mitre.org From: cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org [ mailto:cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org ] On Behalf Of Wunder, John A. Sent: Tuesday, July 28, 2015 4:15 PM To: Jordan, Bret < bret.jordan@bluecoat.com > Cc: JG on CTI-TC < jg@ctin.us >; Chris O'Brien < COBrien@cert.gov.uk >; cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org Subject: Re: [cti-stix] Proposal - Top Level Relationship Object Sure...personally I would do this, which is almost identical to what we do now (other than being at the top level rather than within an object): Relationship ID (for the relationship) [required] From IDREF [required] To IDREF [required] Relationship Qualifier [required] Confidence [optional] I'm undecided on whether information source information belongs in the STIX data model at all. By virtue of being in the data model it means someone is asserting it so it's impossible to verify. Digital signatures or something else out of the data model (relying on TAXII, etc.) seem like a better approach to me. But I don't have strong opinions on this and if we do include information source in the data model I would add that here. John From: Jordan, Bret Date: Tuesday, July 28, 2015 at 4:05 PM To: Wunder, John A. Cc: JG on CTI-TC, Chris O'Brien, cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org Subject: Re: [cti-stix] Proposal - Top Level Relationship Object Great... Now we are discussing it... Please spell out what that would look like. Thanks, Bret Bret Jordan CISSP Director of Security Architecture and Standards Office of the CTO Blue Coat Systems PGP Fingerprint: 63B4 FC53 680A 6B7D 1447 F2C0 74F8 ACAE 7415 0050 Without cryptography vihv vivc ce xhrnrw, however, the only thing that can not be unscrambled is an egg. On Jul 28, 2015, at 13:51, Wunder, John A. < jwunder@mitre.org > wrote: No directionality or description/qualifier? It seems like you want to be able to say *what* a relationship is describing and also which direction it goes in. I.e. TTP malware is variant of other TTP malware vs. TTP malware is same as other TTP malware given a different name by a different vendor From: < cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org > on behalf of Jordan, Bret Date: Tuesday, July 28, 2015 at 3:41 PM To: JG on CTI-TC Cc: Chris O'Brien, cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org Subject: Re: [cti-stix] Proposal - Top Level Relationship Object I see the relationship object being pretty simple and straight forward: Relationship IDREF (1-n) Source Confidence Thanks, Bret Bret Jordan CISSP Director of Security Architecture and Standards Office of the CTO Blue Coat Systems PGP Fingerprint: 63B4 FC53 680A 6B7D 1447 F2C0 74F8 ACAE 7415 0050 Without cryptography vihv vivc ce xhrnrw, however, the only thing that can not be unscrambled is an egg. On Jul 28, 2015, at 13:16, JG on CTI-TC < jg@ctin.us > wrote: Chris: You are not going insane...we are all dealing with these same issues. Some of the more recent discussions (after you made this post) with respect to 'Sightings' seem to make a lot of sense to me...that is, to push the Sighting functionality further down in the data model...That is, down to the CybOX level... And I think we need to think about the Relationship object with respect to 'Communities of Interest'... For example, a malware research Community of Interest that is using Indicator, Observable, TTP and ExploitTarget may seek to express Relationships in a way that shows the Static and Behavioral characteristics of the malware (deep in the data model and at a very refined level of granularity) ...Whereas an Incident Response Community of Interest that is using Indicator, Incident and CourseOfAction may need the Relationship object defined in a separate way.... that is, one that is more tied to actionable intelligence which may then tie into ExploitTarget, ThreatActor, and Campaign...which then becomes of interest to a law enforcement Community of Interest. Of course... handling this may take us back into the debate on Profiles... Jane Ginn CTIN On 7/27/2015 3:44 AM, Chris O'Brien wrote: For what it's worth, from me, I think this would be pretty huge (coupled with the sightings object as well). As an analyst trying to identify useful data for my customers on large data sets, I'm interested in being able to produce top-level, automated assessments on data quality of feeds/dbs of stix data, and one of the ways that I'd suggest that a specific data point is of a 'high quality' is if it has multiple relationships and/or sightings. Add in to that the ability to rank producers, and even analytical assertion confidence, and you've got all the makings of a an algorithm for a heuristic grading scheme that could feed something even more awesome...like a machine learning project that can conduct threat pattern detection... As you say, Bret, this also gives scope for those relationships to have their own concept of 'quality' based on their related analytical assertions / confidence. I'd perhaps throw in to the discussion that it may not need to be a standalone object in its own right - we're currently experimenting with using the existing stix architecture relationships (with a little extra meta data) to achieve the desired effect, but it gets messy quickly and direct references to the relationships are by-way-of the object that they sit on (then you ask...which end of the relationship is the 'master' for that relationship, or must they both be updated when a change is made...what happens if one of them isn't in your namespace, etc, etc). Jimmy-rigging solutions to those issues feels feasible, but messy, prescriptive and makes anyone with a coding background have a little cry to themselves. It's something we're having to think about here at the moment - just wanted to mention that it's still possible and would be less impactful to existing deployments. Cheers, cob PS: If anyone else is looking in to this sort of heuristic / predictive / minority report-esque implementation, it'd be good to hear from you. If only to confirm that I'm not going completely insane.


  • 8.  Re: [cti-stix] Proposal - Top Level Relationship Object

    Posted 07-30-2015 04:56
    "Practical men may despise the tales, earnest men condemn them as lies, some even consider them wicked ; one refused to write any more for a whole estate ; my best friend says they are all ' blethers.' But one man's rubbish may be another's treasure, and what is the standard of value in such a pursuit as this?" Along with subjective criteria there are also relevance, criticality, risk, and business impact: both in terms of (1) "Cost to Mitigate " as well as (2) "Cost of Mitigation".  Something can be 100% bad,  but if the business impact cost of blocking it far exceeds the risk then for "me" it's different calculus.  For example, there are cyclical trends over the past few years where a very high percentage of malicious weaponized content is hosted on Wordpress.  If my workforce contains an influential group of Research Scientists, then any attempts to "block all Wordpress Sites" will fail miserably. I have always recommended that one consumes all intelligence, and if new actionable data is found, Automatically assess if you've observed any matching activity over the past year.   If Yes:  Investigate (Share Sightings with Source where indicated/appropriate) If No:  Automatically block if practical Sharing my sightings, findings, assertions/basis for same are in fact "my vote" [+1] on consideration of  "Information Reliability" Patrick Maroney President Integrated Networking Technologies, Inc. Desk: (856)983-0001 Cell: (609)841-5104 Email: pmaroney@specere.org _____________________________ From: Terry MacDonald < terry.macdonald@threatloop.com > Sent: Wednesday, July 29, 2015 8:16 PM Subject: Re: [cti-stix] Proposal - Top Level Relationship Object To: Jordan, Bret < bret.jordan@bluecoat.com > Cc: Jason Keirstead < jason.keirstead@ca.ibm.com >, Terry MacDonald < terry.macdonald@threatloop.com >, < cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org >, Chris O'Brien < cobrien@cert.gov.uk >, JG on CTI-TC < jg@ctin.us >, Patrick Maroney < pmaroney@specere.org >, Baker, Jon < bakerj@mitre.org >, Wunder, John A. < jwunder@mitre.org >, Aharon Chernin < achernin@soltra.com > Not necessarily Bret. It may be an 'hypothesis' that someone is wanting to share - to 'put it out there' to see if anyone agrees with it. Being able to mark something (using the Information reliability scale I posted earlier) as '3 - Possibly True' or '4 - Doubtfully True' then allows consumers to determine what level of confidence they want to assign to the information.  Ultimately each organization has its own criteria for determining what believes the truth to be. Information provided over STIX is just someones opinion. They are not facts (ok maybe some cybox objects are) but are reflections of conclusions that someone has decided upon. It's up to the consuming organization to decide what it thinks is the truth.  Consumers need to ask the following for each bit of information they receive: How reliable is the information source that gave me this data (source reliability) How reliable does the source think the data is (information reliability) In my opinion as a consumer I should be collecting everyone's opinions, hypotheses and guesses, no matter how mad - and making my own determination as to what I think. I should be crowdsourcing everyones opinions. All information is important in gaining insight even if it's seemingly nonsense at the time . The important thing is to give people a way of [+1] or [-1] on other people's relationships so that bad relationships are downvoted and become less important, and good relationships are upvoted and become more important. This will allow consumers to adjust what they think is true over time, and reflect the true nature of intelligence gathering - trying to make sense of rumour and gossip. It also will allow people over time to determine which organizations they should be listening to, and which ones they should ignore. Kind of like how stackoverflow does things :). Cheers Terry MacDonald STIX, TAXII, CybOX Consultant M: +61-407-203-026 E:  terry.macdonald@threatloop.com W:  www.threatloop.com 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 30 July 2015 at 08:57, Jordan, Bret < bret.jordan@bluecoat.com > wrote: I will choose to argue that if you have any level of context, then by definition you have some level of Reliability / Confidence / or what ever end up calling it.   Thanks, Bret Bret Jordan CISSP Director of Security Architecture and Standards Office of the CTO Blue Coat Systems PGP Fingerprint: 63B4 FC53 680A 6B7D 1447  F2C0 74F8 ACAE 7415 0050 "Without cryptography vihv vivc ce xhrnrw, however, the only thing that can not be unscrambled is an egg."  On Jul 29, 2015, at 16:39, Patrick Maroney < Pmaroney@Specere.org > wrote: Re: "One comment, if you have no confidence in the accuracy of something, meaning you have not done any due diligence on your end, should you really be sharing it? Isn't this the whole problem with the Internet today? People spewing forth crap that is just wrong, and then it gets archived in Google as Gospel. " Sharing unfiltered, unvetted intelligence on Emerging Threats/Previously Unrecognized Threats is extremely valuable in many of the communities I participate in.  The critical element is to properly mark it.  For example one community uses "Investigating" to flag something as preliminary (say I've analyzed 100% 0Day APT Malware, and I run Strings on the binary and get 50 IP Addresses and Domains.  Yet the Malware was only observed to attempt communication with 6/50.  By sharing this type of intelligence [WITH CONTEXT] with the community others can be aware and say, Hey!!!  I didn't see the vectors you did, but I did see a different subset of 6 out of your 50.  We ran it in an air gapped sandbox and when the test access to Google.com failed the Malware beaconing switched to these different IPs and Ports.  Let's mark these 6 new IOCs as actionable and let everyone know the malware may behave differently in different environments and to keep an eye out for the other 38 IOCs." Capturing and retaining properly marked indicators has also revealed key discoveries years later:  for example: "Hey we were investigating something else and our search revealed APT Actor "X" was indeed using nameyourfavoritecommoditybotnet back in 2011!!!!  We didn't realize we had actionable indicators at the time.  Thanks for posting those informational Strings back in 2011!!!!! Filtering Intelligence will significantly impede detection of multi-Stage exploitation and variants of RATs deployed in the Entrenchment phase of lateral movement once adversary has established their initial beachhead and begins deploying.  The key is to ensure you convey all of the context you've developed (and "show your work" to back any of your assertions).   Understand in these assertions that, as always, other world views/use cases, methods are equally valid. Patrick Maroney President Integrated Networking Technologies, Inc. Desk: (856)983-0001 Cell: (609)841-5104 Email: pmaroney@specere.org On Wed, Jul 29, 2015 at 3:06 PM -0700, "Terry MacDonald" < terry.macdonald@threatloop.com > wrote: I was thinking back to the Admiralty Code ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Admiralty_code ) regarding reliability and credibility when I wrote that.  The idea was if someone had learned from a 3rd party that there was a relationship between Threat Group A and Threat Group B, but had not yet been able to determine the reliability/truthfulness of what that third party had said. They may want to send out that relationship, as kind of a 'something we've heard but not had a chance to verify ourselves'. That's where I was headed with the Unknown option. Maybe it would be better to use the terms from Information Reliability instead of Confidence when describing relationships within STIX? ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_source_and_information_reliability ) Rating Description 1 Confirmed Logical, consistent with other relevant information, confirmed by independent sources. 2 Probably true Logical, consistent with other relevant information, not confirmed. 3 Possibly true Reasonably logical, agrees with some relevant information, not confirmed. 4 Doubtfully true Not logical but possible, no other information on the subject, not confirmed. 5 Improbable Not logical, contradicted by other relevant information. 6 Cannot be judged The validity of the information can not be determined. Just a thought. Cheers Terry MacDonald STIX, TAXII, CybOX Consultant M: +61-407-203-026 E:  terry.macdonald@threatloop.com W:  www.threatloop.com 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 30 July 2015 at 07:12, Jason Keirstead < Jason.Keirstead@ca.ibm.com > wrote: What is the use case where someone is asserting something with no information behind it though? I am kind of lost on that. Why would it be being asserted? - Jason Keirstead Product Architect, Security Intelligence, IBM Security Systems www.ibm.com/security www.securityintelligence.com Without data, all you are is just another person with an opinion - Unknown <graycol.gif> Terry MacDonald ---2015/07/29 06:03:11 PM---I think there is a difference: 0 confidence = I have checked this information and I do not have any From: Terry MacDonald < terry.macdonald@threatloop.com > To: Jason Keirstead/CanEast/IBM@IBMCA Cc: "Wunder, John A." < jwunder@mitre.org >, Aharon Chernin < achernin@soltra.com >, "Baker, Jon" < bakerj@mitre.org >, "Jordan, Bret" < bret.jordan@bluecoat.com >, "Chris O'Brien" < COBrien@cert.gov.uk >, " cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org " < cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org >, JG on CTI-TC < jg@ctin.us > Date: 2015/07/29 06:03 PM Subject: Re: [cti-stix] Proposal - Top Level Relationship Object Sent by: < cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org > I think there is a difference: 0 confidence = I have checked this information and I do not have any faith that it is true. Unknown = There is no information to say if this is true or not true. We have no way to infer anything at present. --- I'd also say that there is the potential here for using something like the Admiralty code as a replacement for confidence..... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Admiralty_code : Reliability of Source A - Completely reliable B - Usually reliable C - Fairly reliable D - Not usually reliable E - Unreliable F - Reliability cannot be judged Accuracy of data (Credibility) 1 - Confirmed by other sources 2 - Probably True 3 - Possibly True 4 - Doubtful 5 - Improbable 6 - Truth cannot be judged Maybe that makes sense more so than Confidence? --- I also believe that we need to keep each relationship as a single direction relationship, to enable someone to discern a 'hierarchy' from the relationships they receive, rather than just a 'group' (as highlighted by others on the thread). If we combine all the relationships into a pool, we lose the ability of separating those relationships back out. I would like to keep the Source_ID and Target_ID separation. ID [1] [Required]: The ID of the relationship Version [ 1] [Required]: The version of the relationship; a simple number to be used with the ID for version control (instead of timestamp) Type [1] [Required]: The “type” of relationship being expressed.  (Not sure of how this works yet) Description [0..N] [Optional]: Words about the relationship. Source_ID [1] [Required] : The ID of one or more source entities in the relationship as a URI (not QName) Target_ID [1..N] [Required]: The ID of one or more targets in the relationship as a URI (not QName) Start_Time [0..1] [Required]: A timestamp in UTC stating when the relationship between the objects started, or the text 'unknown'. End_Time [0..1] [Required]: A timestamp in UTC stating when the relationship between the objects ended, or the text 'ongoing', or the text 'unknown'. Confidence [1] [Required]: A measure of confidence in the relationship.  (or should we look at Reliability/Credibility as discussed above?) Timestamp [0..1] [Required]: A timestamp in UTC stating when the relationship object was created.   Cheers Terry MacDonald STIX, TAXII, CybOX Consultant M: +61-407-203-026 E:  terry.macdonald@threatloop.com W:  www.threatloop.com 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 30 July 2015 at 05:25, Jason Keirstead < Jason.Keirstead@ca.ibm.com > wrote: Well... 0 would be exactly what it says... zero confidence, aka "no confidence". Is there a difference between "no confidence" and "unknown confidence"? To me they're the same thing... if you don't know, you don't know. - Jason Keirstead Product Architect, Security Intelligence, IBM Security Systems www.ibm.com/security www.securityintelligence.com Without data, all you are is just another person with an opinion - Unknown <graycol.gif> "Wunder, John A." ---2015/07/29 04:23:55 PM---I don't know, what does a confidence of 0 mean? To me the statement that the confidence is unknown i From: "Wunder, John A." < jwunder@mitre.org > To: Jason Keirstead/CanEast/IBM@IBMCA Cc: "Jordan, Bret" < bret.jordan@bluecoat.com >, Aharon Chernin < achernin@soltra.com >, "Baker, Jon" < bakerj@mitre.org >, JG on CTI-TC < jg@ctin.us >, "Chris O'Brien" < COBrien@cert.gov.uk >, " cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org " < cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org > Date: 2015/07/29 04:23 PM Subject: Re: [cti-stix] Proposal - Top Level Relationship Object I don't know, what does a confidence of 0 mean? To me the statement that the confidence is unknown is quite different from the statement that the confidence very low. From: < cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org > on behalf of Jason Keirstead Date: Wednesday, July 29, 2015 at 3:19 PM To: "Wunder, John A." Cc: "Jordan, Bret", Aharon Chernin, Jon Baker, JG on CTI-TC, Chris O'Brien, " cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org " Subject: Re: [cti-stix] Proposal - Top Level Relationship Object What is the difference between having confidence be optional or "unknown" and assigning a value of 0? - Jason Keirstead Product Architect, Security Intelligence, IBM Security Systems www.ibm.com/security www.securityintelligence.com Without data, all you are is just another person with an opinion - Unknown <graycol.gif> "Wunder, John A." ---2015/07/29 03:10:51 PM---I agree with you on reducing optionality but to me these "unknown" values are just hiding optionalit From: "Wunder, John A." < jwunder@mitre.org > To: "Jordan, Bret" < bret.jordan@bluecoat.com >, Aharon Chernin < achernin@soltra.com > Cc: "Baker, Jon" < bakerj@mitre.org >, JG on CTI-TC < jg@ctin.us >, "Chris O'Brien" < COBrien@cert.gov.uk >, " cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org " < cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org > Date: 2015/07/29 03:10 PM Subject: Re: [cti-stix] Proposal - Top Level Relationship Object Sent by: < cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org > I agree with you on reducing optionality but to me these "unknown" values are just hiding optionality rather than eliminating it. If anything it seems like having the field not present vs. a special "unknown" value is more obvious and explicit because it makes it clear that it's a special case. Otherwise you're going to have a lot of "if val == 'unknown'" code paths, and hardcoded strings with special meanings are bad. John From: "Jordan, Bret" Date: Wednesday, July 29, 2015 at 1:55 PM To: Aharon Chernin Cc: Jon Baker, "Wunder, John A.", JG on CTI-TC, Chris O'Brien, " cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org " Subject: Re: [cti-stix] Proposal - Top Level Relationship Object It has to be that way... Confidence has to be required, even if the the value is "unknown". We need to reduce the optionality and make code decision trees easier. Thanks, Bret Bret Jordan CISSP Director of Security Architecture and Standards Office of the CTO Blue Coat Systems PGP Fingerprint: 63B4 FC53 680A 6B7D 1447 F2C0 74F8 ACAE 7415 0050 "Without cryptography vihv vivc ce xhrnrw, however, the only thing that can not be unscrambled is an egg." On Jul 29, 2015, at 08:57, Aharon Chernin < achernin@soltra.com > wrote: Have you considered the case where an analyst wants to simply say that this collection of objects seems to be related? Wouldn't this just be a low confidence relationship? Aharon Chernin CTO SOLTRA An FS-ISAC & DTCC Company 18301 Bermuda green Dr Tampa, fl 33647 813.470.2173 achernin@soltra.com www.soltra.com From: cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org < cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org > on behalf of Baker, Jon < bakerj@mitre.org > Sent: Wednesday, July 29, 2015 8:37 AM To: Wunder, John A.; Jordan, Bret Cc: JG on CTI-TC; Chris O'Brien; cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org Subject: RE: [cti-stix] Proposal - Top Level Relationship Object John, Have you considered the case where an analyst wants to simply say that this collection of objects seems to be related? Imagine a case where you think that a bunch of things (incidents/observables/etc) are related, but you have not yet done the in depth analysis to understand the nature of their relationship. I had this sort of generic grouping of things in mind for a top level relationship object. In this case, I don’t think you could always have a From and To IDREF. You might just have a collection of IDREFs. Jon ============================================ Jonathan O. Baker J83D - Cyber Security Partnerships, Sharing, and Automation The MITRE Corporation Email: bakerj@mitre.org From: cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org [ mailto:cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org ] On Behalf Of Wunder, John A. Sent: Tuesday, July 28, 2015 4:15 PM To: Jordan, Bret < bret.jordan@bluecoat.com > Cc: JG on CTI-TC < jg@ctin.us >; Chris O'Brien < COBrien@cert.gov.uk >; cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org Subject: Re: [cti-stix] Proposal - Top Level Relationship Object Sure...personally I would do this, which is almost identical to what we do now (other than being at the top level rather than within an object): Relationship ID (for the relationship) [required] From IDREF [required] To IDREF [required] Relationship Qualifier [required] Confidence [optional] I'm undecided on whether information source information belongs in the STIX data model at all. By virtue of being in the data model it means someone is asserting it so it's impossible to verify. Digital signatures or something else out of the data model (relying on TAXII, etc.) seem like a better approach to me. But I don't have strong opinions on this and if we do include information source in the data model I would add that here. John From: "Jordan, Bret" Date: Tuesday, July 28, 2015 at 4:05 PM To: "Wunder, John A." Cc: JG on CTI-TC, Chris O'Brien, " cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org " Subject: Re: [cti-stix] Proposal - Top Level Relationship Object Great... Now we are discussing it... Please spell out what that would look like. Thanks, Bret Bret Jordan CISSP Director of Security Architecture and Standards Office of the CTO Blue Coat Systems PGP Fingerprint: 63B4 FC53 680A 6B7D 1447 F2C0 74F8 ACAE 7415 0050 "Without cryptography vihv vivc ce xhrnrw, however, the only thing that can not be unscrambled is an egg." On Jul 28, 2015, at 13:51, Wunder, John A. < jwunder@mitre.org > wrote: No directionality or description/qualifier? It seems like you want to be able to say *what* a relationship is describing and also which direction it goes in. I.e. TTP malware "is variant of" other TTP malware vs. TTP malware "is same as" other TTP malware given a different name by a different vendor From: < cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org > on behalf of "Jordan, Bret" Date: Tuesday, July 28, 2015 at 3:41 PM To: JG on CTI-TC Cc: Chris O'Brien, " cti-stix@lists.oasis-open.org " Subject: Re: [cti-stix] Proposal - Top Level Relationship Object I see the relationship object being pretty simple and straight forward: Relationship IDREF (1-n) Source Confidence Thanks, Bret Bret Jordan CISSP Director of Security Architecture and Standards Office of the CTO Blue Coat Systems PGP Fingerprint: 63B4 FC53 680A 6B7D 1447 F2C0 74F8 ACAE 7415 0050 "Without cryptography vihv vivc ce xhrnrw, however, the only thing that can not be unscrambled is an egg." On Jul 28, 2015, at 13:16, JG on CTI-TC < jg@ctin.us > wrote: Chris: You are not going insane...we are all dealing with these same issues. Some of the more recent discussions (after you made this post) with respect to 'Sightings' seem to make a lot of sense to me...that is, to push the Sighting functionality further down in the data model...That is, down to the CybOX level... And I think we need to think about the Relationship object with respect to 'Communities of Interest'... For example, a malware research Community of Interest that is using Indicator, Observable, TTP and ExploitTarget may seek to express Relationships in a way that shows the Static and Behavioral characteristics of the malware (deep in the data model and at a very refined level of granularity) ...Whereas an Incident Response Community of Interest that is using Indicator, Incident and CourseOfAction may need the Relationship object defined in a separate way.... that is, one that is more tied to "actionable intelligence" which may then tie into ExploitTarget, ThreatActor, and Campaign...which then becomes of interest to a law enforcement Community of Interest. Of course... handling this may take us back into the debate on Profiles... Jane Ginn CTIN On 7/27/2015 3:44 AM, Chris O'Brien wrote: For what it's worth, from me, I think this would be pretty huge (coupled with the sightings object as well). As an analyst trying to identify useful data for my customers on large data sets, I'm interested in being able to produce top-level, automated assessments on data quality of feeds/dbs of stix data, and one of the ways that I'd suggest that a specific data point is of a 'high quality' is if it has multiple relationships and/or sightings. Add in to that the ability to rank producers, and even analytical assertion confidence, and you've got all the makings of a an algorithm for a heuristic grading scheme that could feed something even more awesome...like a machine learning project that can conduct threat pattern detection... As you say, Bret, this also gives scope for those relationships to have their own concept of 'quality' based on their related analytical assertions / confidence. I'd perhaps throw in to the discussion that it may not need to be a standalone object in its own right - we're currently experimenting with using the existing stix architecture relationships (with a little extra meta data) to achieve the desired effect, but it gets messy quickly and direct references to the relationships are by-way-of the object that they sit on (then you ask...which end of the relationship is the 'master' for that relationship, or must they both be updated when a change is made...what happens if one of them isn't in your namespace, etc, etc). Jimmy-rigging solutions to those issues feels feasible, but messy, prescriptive and makes anyone with a coding background have a little cry to themselves. It's something we're having to think about here at the moment - just wanted to mention that it's still possible and would be less impactful to existing deployments. Cheers, cob PS: If anyone else is looking in to this sort of heuristic / predictive / minority report-esque implementation, it'd be good to hear from you. If only to confirm that I'm not going completely insane.


  • 9.  Re: [cti-stix] Proposal - Admiralty Code + ACH

    Posted 07-30-2015 15:54
    All: What if we combine Terry's suggestions about the Admiralty Code with a more classical interpretation of Analysis of Competing Hypotheses (ACH) as has been used in the intelligence community?  This concept is outlined in this chapter of The Psychology of Intelligence Analysis from the CIA: https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/books-and-monographs/psychology-of-intelligence-analysis/art11.html This would address the Use Case that Patrick outlined below... (which BTW, really coincides with some of the threat intel sharing cases I've observed), while at the same time moves us away from a poorly understood description of confidence ...that seems to be problematic because of the different assumptions each User brings to the table. I would see the ACH factor as a Third Dimension to what we've been discussing with respect to Information Reliability. Realize that I'm looking at this from the POV of the Analyst/User that is trying to take IoCs & cyber observables and any other clues and assemble the bigger picture...without a lot of certainty about the Threat Actor, the motivation, the targeted systems, etc....  In this context speculations about competing hypotheses and how they might be assembled in, for example, a Report object, might be useful.... Where an Information Reliability/ACH measure might be applied (e.g., at the CybOX object level) then becomes useful in interpretation by the Human Analysts of the STIX/CybOX information. Jane Ginn On 7/29/2015 5:16 PM, Terry MacDonald wrote: Not necessarily Bret. It may be an 'hypothesis' that someone is wanting to share - to 'put it out there' to see if anyone agrees with it. Being able to mark something (using the Information reliability scale I posted earlier) as '3 - Possibly True' or '4 - Doubtfully True' then allows consumers to determine what level of confidence they want to assign to the information.  On Jul 29, 2015, at 16:39, Patrick Maroney < Pmaroney@Specere.org > wrote: Re: One comment, if you have no confidence in the accuracy of something, meaning you have not done any due diligence on your end, should you really be sharing it? Isn't this the whole problem with the Internet today? People spewing forth crap that is just wrong, and then it gets archived in Google as Gospel. Sharing unfiltered, unvetted intelligence on Emerging Threats/Previously Unrecognized Threats is extremely valuable in many of the communities I participate in.  The critical element is to properly mark it.  For example one community uses Investigating to flag something as preliminary (say I've analyzed 100% 0Day APT Malware, and I run Strings on the binary and get 50 IP Addresses and Domains.  Yet the Malware was only observed to attempt communication with 6/50.  By sharing this type of intelligence [WITH CONTEXT] with the community others can be aware and say, Hey!!!  I didn't see the vectors you did, but I did see a different subset of 6 out of your 50.  We ran it in an air gapped sandbox and when the test access to Google.com failed the Malware beaconing switched to these different IPs and Ports.  Let's mark these 6 new IOCs as actionable and let everyone know the malware may behave differently in different environments and to keep an eye out for the other 38 IOCs. Capturing and retaining properly marked indicators has also revealed key discoveries years later:  for example: Hey we were investigating something else and our search revealed APT Actor X was indeed using nameyourfavoritecommoditybotnet back in 2011!!!!  We didn't realize we had actionable indicators at the time.  Thanks for posting those informational Strings back in 2011!!!!! Filtering Intelligence will significantly impede detection of multi-Stage exploitation and variants of RATs deployed in the Entrenchment phase of lateral movement once adversary has established their initial beachhead and begins deploying.  The key is to ensure you convey all of the context you've developed (and show your work to back any of your assertions).   On Wed, Jul 29, 2015 at 3:06 PM -0700, Terry MacDonald < terry.macdonald@threatloop.com > wrote: I was thinking back to the Admiralty Code ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Admiralty_code ) regarding reliability and credibility when I wrote that.  The idea was if someone had learned from a 3rd party that there was a relationship between Threat Group A and Threat Group B, but had not yet been able to determine the reliability/truthfulness of what that third party had said. They may want to send out that relationship, as kind of a 'something we've heard but not had a chance to verify ourselves'. That's where I was headed with the Unknown option. Maybe it would be better to use the terms from Information Reliability instead of Confidence when describing relationships within STIX? ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_source_and_information_reliability ) Rating Description 1 Confirmed Logical, consistent with other relevant information, confirmed by independent sources. 2 Probably true Logical, consistent with other relevant information, not confirmed. 3 Possibly true Reasonably logical, agrees with some relevant information, not confirmed. 4 Doubtfully true Not logical but possible, no other information on the subject, not confirmed. 5 Improbable Not logical, contradicted by other relevant information. 6 Cannot be judged The validity of the information can not be determined.


  • 10.  Re: [cti-stix] Proposal - Admiralty Code + ACH

    Posted 07-30-2015 16:41
    Can you spell this out in a table format with options so we can better understand what is being proposed?  Like what we are doing in the relationship object discussion? Thanks, Bret Bret Jordan CISSP Director of Security Architecture and Standards Office of the CTO Blue Coat Systems PGP Fingerprint: 63B4 FC53 680A 6B7D 1447  F2C0 74F8 ACAE 7415 0050 Without cryptography vihv vivc ce xhrnrw, however, the only thing that can not be unscrambled is an egg.   On Jul 30, 2015, at 09:53, JG on CTI-TC < jg@ctin.us > wrote: All: What if we combine Terry's suggestions about the Admiralty Code with a more classical interpretation of Analysis of Competing Hypotheses (ACH) as has been used in the intelligence community?  This concept is outlined in this chapter of The Psychology of Intelligence Analysis from the CIA: https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/books-and-monographs/psychology-of-intelligence-analysis/art11.html This would address the Use Case that Patrick outlined below... (which BTW, really coincides with some of the threat intel sharing cases I've observed), while at the same time moves us away from a poorly understood description of confidence ...that seems to be problematic because of the different assumptions each User brings to the table. I would see the ACH factor as a Third Dimension to what we've been discussing with respect to Information Reliability. Realize that I'm looking at this from the POV of the Analyst/User that is trying to take IoCs & cyber observables and any other clues and assemble the bigger picture...without a lot of certainty about the Threat Actor, the motivation, the targeted systems, etc....  In this context speculations about competing hypotheses and how they might be assembled in, for example, a Report object, might be useful.... Where an Information Reliability/ACH measure might be applied (e.g., at the CybOX object level) then becomes useful in interpretation by the Human Analysts of the STIX/CybOX information. Jane Ginn On 7/29/2015 5:16 PM, Terry MacDonald wrote: Not necessarily Bret. It may be an 'hypothesis' that someone is wanting to share - to 'put it out there' to see if anyone agrees with it. Being able to mark something (using the Information reliability scale I posted earlier) as '3 - Possibly True' or '4 - Doubtfully True' then allows consumers to determine what level of confidence they want to assign to the information.  On Jul 29, 2015, at 16:39, Patrick Maroney < Pmaroney@Specere.org > wrote: Re: One comment, if you have no confidence in the accuracy of something, meaning you have not done any due diligence on your end, should you really be sharing it? Isn't this the whole problem with the Internet today? People spewing forth crap that is just wrong, and then it gets archived in Google as Gospel. Sharing unfiltered, unvetted intelligence on Emerging Threats/Previously Unrecognized Threats is extremely valuable in many of the communities I participate in.  The critical element is to properly mark it.  For example one community uses Investigating to flag something as preliminary (say I've analyzed 100% 0Day APT Malware, and I run Strings on the binary and get 50 IP Addresses and Domains.  Yet the Malware was only observed to attempt communication with 6/50.  By sharing this type of intelligence [WITH CONTEXT] with the community others can be aware and say, Hey!!!  I didn't see the vectors you did, but I did see a different subset of 6 out of your 50.  We ran it in an air gapped sandbox and when the test access to Google.com failed the Malware beaconing switched to these different IPs and Ports.  Let's mark these 6 new IOCs as actionable and let everyone know the malware may behave differently in different environments and to keep an eye out for the other 38 IOCs. Capturing and retaining properly marked indicators has also revealed key discoveries years later:  for example: Hey we were investigating something else and our search revealed APT Actor X was indeed using nameyourfavoritecommoditybotnet back in 2011!!!!  We didn't realize we had actionable indicators at the time.  Thanks for posting those informational Strings back in 2011!!!!! Filtering Intelligence will significantly impede detection of multi-Stage exploitation and variants of RATs deployed in the Entrenchment phase of lateral movement once adversary has established their initial beachhead and begins deploying.  The key is to ensure you convey all of the context you've developed (and show your work to back any of your assertions).   On Wed, Jul 29, 2015 at 3:06 PM -0700, Terry MacDonald < terry.macdonald@threatloop.com > wrote: I was thinking back to the Admiralty Code ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Admiralty_code ) regarding reliability and credibility when I wrote that.  The idea was if someone had learned from a 3rd party that there was a relationship between Threat Group A and Threat Group B, but had not yet been able to determine the reliability/truthfulness of what that third party had said. They may want to send out that relationship, as kind of a 'something we've heard but not had a chance to verify ourselves'. That's where I was headed with the Unknown option. Maybe it would be better to use the terms from Information Reliability instead of Confidence when describing relationships within STIX? ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_source_and_information_reliability ) Rating Description 1 Confirmed Logical, consistent with other relevant information, confirmed by independent sources. 2 Probably true Logical, consistent with other relevant information, not confirmed. 3 Possibly true Reasonably logical, agrees with some relevant information, not confirmed. 4 Doubtfully true Not logical but possible, no other information on the subject, not confirmed. 5 Improbable Not logical, contradicted by other relevant information. 6 Cannot be judged The validity of the information can not be determined. Attachment: signature.asc Description: Message signed with OpenPGP using GPGMail