One document matched: draft-ietf-inch-requirements-01.txt
Differences from draft-ietf-inch-requirements-00.txt
Network Working Group Yuri Demchenko
INTERNET DRAFT NLnet Labs
Category: Informational Hiroyuki Ohno
WIDE Project
Expires December 2003 Glenn M Keeni
Cyber Solutions Inc.
June, 2003
Requirements for Format for INcident Report Exchange (FINE)
<draft-ietf-inch-requirements-01.txt>
Status of this Memo
This document is an Internet-Draft and is in full conformance with
all provisions of Section 10 of RFC2026.
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Distribution of this memo is unlimited.
Copyright Notice
Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2001). All Rights Reserved.
Abstract
The purpose of the Format for INcident report Exchange (FINE) is to
facilitate the exchange of incident information and statistics among
responsible Computer Security Incident Response Teams (CSIRTs) and
involved parties for reactionary analysis of current intruder
activity and proactive identification of trends that can lead to
incident prevention. A common and well-defined format will help in
exchanging, retrieving and archiving Incident related information
across organizations, regions and countries.
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This document describes the requirements for an Incident Report
Exchange Format.
The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT",
"SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this
document are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119 [1].
Table of Contents
1. Introduction ............................................... 2
2. Incident Handling Framework ................................ 2
3. The Goal ................................................... 7
4. General Requirements ....................................... 8
5. Format Requirements ........................................ 8
6. Communication Requirements ................................. 9
7. Content Requirements ....................................... 9
8. Security Considerations .................................... 11
9. Acknowledgements ........................................... 12
10. References ................................................. 12
11. Authors' Addresses ......................................... 13
Full Copyright Statement ....................................... 13
1. Introduction
Computer security incidents occur across administrative domains often
spanning different organizations and national borders. Therefore, the
exchange of incident information and statistics among involved
parties and the responsible Computer Security Incident Response Teams
(CSIRTs) is crucial for both reactionary analysis of current intruder
activity and proactive identification of trends that can lead to
incident prevention.
In the following we refer to the information pertaining to an
incident as an Incident Report.
To facilitate the incident related information exchange a common well
defined format is needed.
This document defines the high-level functional requirements of a
Format for INcident report Exchange (FINE).
2. Incident Handling Framework
2.1. Incident Description Terms
In the following we define the main terms used in this document.
There are based on current definitions in related documents [7, 8, 9,
10, 11].
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2.1.1. Attack
An assault on system security that derives from an intelligent
threat, i.e., an intelligent act that is a deliberate attempt
(especially in the sense of a method or technique) to evade security
services and violate the security policy of a system.
An Attack can be active, passive. It may be perpetrated by an
insider, an outsider or, via an attack mediator.
2.1.2. Attacker
Attacker is individual who attempts one or more attacks.
For the purpose of FINE, an attacker is described by the
computer/network ID, from which the attack was launched. The
organisation name and/or physical location of the computer/network
are used as additional information.
2.1.3. CSIRT
CSIRT (Computer Security Incident Response Team) is a team that
coordinates and supports the response to security incidents that
involve sites within a defined constituency [7]. The CSIRT generates,
processes and maintains incident reports.
2.1.4. Damage
The intended or unintended consequence of an attack. Description of
damage may include free text description of actual result of attack,
and, where possible, structured information about the particular
damaged system, subsystem or service.
2.1.5. Event
An action directed at a target, which is intended to result in a
change of state (status) of the target. From the point of view of
event origination, it can be defined as any observable occurrence in
a system or network, which resulted in an alert being generated. For
example, three failed logins in 10 seconds might indicate a brute-
force login attack.
2.1.6. Impact
Impact describes result of attack expressed in terms of user
community, for example the cost in terms of financial or other
disruption
2.1.7. Computer/Network Security Incident
A Computer/Network Security Incident, referred to as incident in this
work, is any adverse event (or group of events) wherein an attempt
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has been made, successfully or otherwise, to compromise some aspect
of computer system or network security.
Typical computer security incidents are: a computer intrusion, a
denial-of-service attack, information theft or data manipulation,
etc.
2.1.8. Incident Report
In this document an Incident Report refers to the information
pertaining to an incident. In practice, Incident Report may have
internal proprietary format that is adapted to local Incident
handling procedure and used Incident Handling System (IHS).
Definition of the requirements to the format for Incident Report
exchange is the subject of this document.
2.1.9. Target
The target of an attack. This can be a logical entity( e.g. a user
account, a computer process or data, a logical network or
internetwork) or a physical entity, e.g. (a computer interface, a
router etc.)
2.1.10. Victim
The entity which suffered the attack. For the purpose of FINE victim
is described by its network ID, organisation and location
information.
2.1.11. Other terms
Other terms used: alert, activity, IDS, Security Policy, etc., - are
defined in related I-Ds, RFCs and standards [2, 3, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10].
2.2 The Operational Model
Incident Reports are generated, received and updated. For example, An
organization may send an Incident Report to a CSIRT when an attack
has been detected. Computer Security Incident Response Teams (CSIRTs)
receive Incident Reports from customers, or from other CSIRTs. The
CSIRTs maintain these reports. They may process the reports to
generate statistics, or investigate the Incident further. As part of
the investigation, or as part of the reporting the CSIRT may forward
the Incident Report or parts of it to other CSIRTs. The CSIRTs may
also receive results of investigation, or additional information
related to currently active Incident from other CSIRTs.
These operations are shown in fig. 1
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+-----
CSIRT |
+---------------------+ |
| | |
| +--------+ | |
| | | | |
| | | | Incident Report |
| |Incident|<---------|<----------------->| Customers/
| |ReportDB| | | CSIRTs/
| | |<---+ |<=== FINE ===>| Other Org
| | | | | |
| | | +------+ | |
| +--------+ |Stats | | |
| | |Pkg | | |
| | +-+--+-+ | |
| | | | | |
| +--------+ | | |
+---------------------+ |
| |
V |
Alerts, Reports |
Statistics |
+-----
Fig. 1 Operational Model for FINE
From the operational point of view during the life-cycle of an
Incident Report the following may apply:
+ the report itself evolves;
+ the report is exchanged between CSIRTs and may be
investigated/processed by multiple CSIRTs, simultaneously;
+ the changes in the report may be effected by one or more CSIRTs;
+ a single CSIRT may not be in a position to vouch for the veracity
of all parts of the Incident Report;
+ the Incident Report may exist in several states:
- handling û Incident is being handled
- complete/closed - the Incident Report is not being processed and
no processing is planned
- waiting - the Incident Report is waiting on some event;
From the content point of view and due to the nature of operations
the following should be also considered for defining requirements to
FINE:
+ various parts of an Incident Report will have information of
varying degrees of sensitivity and will need to be handled with
the appropriate level of confidentiality.
+ Incident Report may be multilingual i.e. different parts of the
Incident Report may use different languages. It is also possible
that multiple versions of parts of the report exist, each version
in a different language. The versions may not be consistent.
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3. The Goal
The purpose of the Format for INcident Report Exchange (FINE) is to
facilitate the exchange of incident information and statistics among
involved parties and Computer Security Incident Response Teams
(CSIRTs) for reactionary analysis of current security incidents and
proactive identification of trends that can lead to incident
prevention. A common and well-defined format for Incident Reports
will help in exchanging, retrieving and archiving Incident related
information across organizations, regions and countries.
The goal of the FINE format is
+ to make the semantics of the report as clear and unambiguous as
possible, intended for use across organizational, regional and
national boundaries;
+ to ensure that the report (or parts of it) has a well defined
syntax;
+ to ensure that the structure of the report allows easy
categorization and statistical analysis;
+ to ensure the verifiability of the integrity of the report, a the
authenticity of the report source.
4. General Requirements
4.1 The definition of the Format for INcident Report Exchange (FINE)
shall reference and use previously published RFCs where possible.
5. Format Requirements
5.1 FINE shall support full internationalization and localization.
A significant part of the Incident Report will comprise of human-
readable text. Since some Incidents need involvement of CSIRTs from
different countries and geographic regions, FINE must have provisions
so that the Incident Report can be presented in the local language in
accordance with local rules and conventions.
FINE must have provisions to specify the naming rules and conventions
that have been applied in the Incident Report.
In cases where the messages contain text strings and names that need
characters other than Latin-1 (or ISO 8859-1), the information should
preferably be represented using the ISO/IEC IS 10646-1 character set
and encoded using the UTF-8 transformation format, and optionally
using local character sets and encodings.
In case when Incident information/data is received by party that may
not correctly display and process other encoding than UTF-8, or
information is exchanged between parties that priory known may not
process correctly non-native (but other than UTF-8) encoding, the
elements that can carry encoding sensitive information should marked
with the special attribute and/or necessary transformation should be
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applied. Use of this attribute can be initiated by sending party, or
re-sending party that wants to preserve the specific content.
5.2 FINE must support aggregation and filtering of Incident Report
data.
The format of FINE must be structured with components that have a
well-defined syntax and semantics.
5.3 FINE must provide the possibility for recording the evolution of
an Incident Report during its lifetime.
An Incident Report may evolve with time. As investigation proceeds,
it is likely that more information about an incident will be revealed
and parts of the earlier information will be modified/deleted. FINE
must support the recording of these changes. changes with the level
of details defined by internal/adopted Incident Handling procedure.
5.4 FINE must support the application of an access restriction policy
to individual components of the Incident Report.
An Incident Report may contain sensitive information. It must be
possible to specify the degree of confidentiality for the individual
components of the Incident Report. Applications can then implement
different levels of access restrictions, for the different components
of the Incident Report.
5.5 FINE report must be globally uniquely identifiable.
It should be possible to refer to an Incident Report unambiguously
using the globally unique identifier. It should also be possible to
map the origin/creator of an Incident Report from its globally unique
identifier.
5.6. The Format for Incident report Exchange itself must be
extensible. The extension will be in terms of addition of components
and/or extending the components.
6. Communication Mechanisms Requirements
6.1 The communication mechanisms must have no bearing on the
authenticity, integrity, and confidentiality of a FINE formatted
Incident Report. Provisions for authenticity, integrity and
confidentiality should be made in FINE.
Incident Report exchange will normally be conducted using standard
communication protocols and exchange mechanisms, for example, e-mail,
HTTP, FTP, XML Web Services, etc. FINE must not rely on communication
mechanisms or specific applications to ensure authenticity, integrity
and/or confidentiality of an Incident Report.
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7. Content Requirements
7.1 FINE must be flexible enough to support various degrees of
completeness. At the same time it must clearly state the minimal
information without which the information in the Incident Report will
be seriously degraded.
7.2 FINE must contain information about the various entities involved
in the incident. An Incident Report will generally refer to one or
more entities. The entity may be the attacker, perpetrator, victim,
or an observer.
7.3 FINE should support the description of various aspects/details of
the entities involved in the incident. There may be several facets of
an entity involved in an Incident Report. The entity may have zero or
more network addresses and names as well as zero or more location
names, organizational names, person names, machine names etc..
7.4 FINE should contain the description of the method how the attack
or security event was conducted if it is known.
Well-known classification/enumeration schemes should be used to
describe the type of attack or vulnerabilities and exposures caused
particular Incident or security Event.
7.5 FINE must include the identity of the creator (or current owner)
of the Incident Report (CSIRT or other authority). This may be the
sender in an information exchange or the team currently handling the
incident.
7.6 FINE should contain reference to advisories corresponding to the
Incident Report, e.g. CERT/CC, CVE, and others.
7.7 The FINE may contain a description of the Incident or comprising
security events in a natural language.
7.8 FINE should provide the possibility to include or reference
additional detailed information/data related to the specific
underlying event(s)/activity.
This information may include IDMEF [5] messages, which have been
generated by security devices.
7.9 FINE should provide the possibility for describing the impact of
an incident.
There should be guidelines to describe the impact on the target
to ensure a uniform interpretation of the description.
7.10 The Incident Report should describe the actions taken since the
occurrence of the incident.
7.11 Time shall be reported as the local time and time zone offset
from UTC. (Note: See RFC 1902 for guidelines on reporting time.)
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Internal Incident Report may contain local presentation of time
related information, however FINE must support unambiguous time
specification. In case when normalization of the time information is
not possible (like in case of referencing additional data about the
Incident that cannot be changed, e.g. timestamped log data), the time
offset should be mentioned.
7.12 FINE will not have any specific requirement for granularity of
time.
Different systems will support different time granularities. FINE
should be able to support Incident Reports from various systems
irrespective of their time granularity.
7.13 FINE should allow the application of external mechanisms to
support authenticity, integrity and non-repudiation checks of
Incident Reports.
7.14 FINE must have a well defined semantics.
8. Security Considerations
This memo does not describe a protocol by itself. This memo describes
the requirements for an Incident Report Exchange Format. The reports
themselves are about security incidents. The contents of the Incident
Reports will have significant direct and/or indirect impact on the
security and privacy of a network and/or individuals. FINE
implementers should take care to analyze and implement the
requirements stated in 5.5 and 7.12.
9. Acknowledgments.
The precursor of this document is "RFC3067 TERENAÆs Incident Object
Description Exchange Format Requirements" [2] which is based on the
work done at Incident Object Description Exchange Format Working
Group at TERENA. Subsequent work and discussion has been carried out
in the INCH-WG and in the WIDE-WG on Network Management and Security.
10. References
[1] Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate Requirement
Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119, March 1997
[2] Arvidsson, J., Cormack, A., Demchenko, Y., Meijer J. "TERENA's
Incident Object Description and Exchange Format Requirements", RFC
3067, February 2001
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[3] Incident Object Description and Exchange Format Data Model and
Extensible Markup Language (XML) Document Type Definition û October
2002. Work in progress.
[4] Taxonomy of the Computer Security Incident related terminology -
http://www.terena.nl/task-forces/tf-csirt/iiodef/docs/i-
taxonomy_terms.html
[5] Intrusion Detection Exchange Format Requirements by Wood, M. -
October 2002, Work in Progress.
[6] Guidelines for Evidence Collection and Archiving by Dominique
Brezinski, Tom Killalea û BCP 55, RFC 3227, February 2002.
[7] Brownlee, N. and E. Guttman, "Expectations for Computer Security
Incident Response", BCP 21, RFC 2350, June 1998.
[8] Shirey, R., "Internet Security Glossary", FYI 36, RFC 2828, May
2000.
[9] Establishing a Computer Security Incident Response Capability
(CSIRC). NIST Special Publication 800-3, November, 1991
[10] Handbook for Computer Security Incident Response Teams
(CSIRTs), Moira J. West-Brown, Don Stikvoort, Klaus-Peter
Kossakowski. - CMU/SEI-98-HB-001. - Pittsburgh, PA: Carnegie Mellon
University, 1998.
[11] A Common Language for Computer Security Incidents by John D.
Howard and Thomas A. Longstaff. - Sandia Report: SAND98-8667, Sandia
National Laboratories -
http://www.cert.org/research/taxonomy_988667.pdf
11. AuthorsÆ Addresses:
Yuri Demchenko
NLnet Labs, The Netherlands
Email: demch@chello.nl
Hiroyuki Ohno
WIDE Project, Japan
Email: hohno@wide.ad.jp
Glenn Mansfield Keeni
Cyber Solutions Inc.
Sendai, Japan
Email: glenn@cysols.com
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Full Copyright Statement
Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2000). All Rights Reserved.
The IETF takes no position regarding the validity or scope of any
intellectual property or other rights that might be claimed to
pertain to the implementation or use of the technology described in
this document or the extent to which any license under such rights
might or might not be available; neither does it represent that it
has made any effort to identify any such rights. Information on the
IETF's procedures with respect to rights in standards-track and
standards-related documentation can be found in BCP-11. Copies of
claims of rights made available for publication and any assurances of
licenses to be made available, or the result of an attempt made to
obtain a general license or permission for the use of such
proprietary rights by implementers or users of this specification can
be obtained from the IETF Secretariat.
The IETF invites any interested party to bring to its attention any
copyrights, patents or patent applications, or other proprietary
rights which may cover technology that may be required to practice
this standard. Please address the information to the IETF Executive
Director.
Acknowledgement
Funding for the RFC Editor function is currently provided by the
Internet Society.
Appendix û non-normative
Major Changes (reverse count)
Information about changes to the document since publishing û00
version will be documented here.
Major changes in version û01
1) clarified definition of some terms û still in the process, needs
more discussion with concerned parties.
2) re-written section 2. Operational model
3) added text about multilingual support for non-utf-8 character sets
to item ô5.1 FINE shall support full internationalization and
localizationö û results of discussion at IETF-56
4) included clear statement about unique identification of the
Incident Report to item ô5.1 FINE shall support full
internationalization and localization.ö
5) added item about the possibility of Incident description in
natural language:
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7.7 The FINE may contain a description of the Incident or comprising
security events in a natural language.
6) requirement about describing impact of the Incident extended (item
7.9) with recommendation to provide guidelines to describe the impact
on the target to ensure a uniform interpretation of the description.
7) item 7.11 about time normalization extended with the possibility
to describe time offset when normalization is not possible.
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