Managed Incident Lightweight Exchange
charter-ietf-mile-03-05

The Managed Incident Lightweight Exchange (MILE) working group develops
standards to support computer and network security incident management; an
incident is an unplanned event that occurs in an information technology (IT)
infrastructure. An incident could be a benign configuration issue, IT incident,
a system compromise, socially engineered phishing attack, or a
denial-of-service (DoS) attack, etc. When an incident is detected, or
suspected, there may be a need for organizations to collaborate. This
collaboration effort may take several forms including joint analysis,
information dissemination, and/or a coordinated operational response. Examples
of the response may include filing a report, notifying the source of the
incident, requesting that a third-party resolve/mitigate the incident, sharing
select indicators of compromise, or requesting that the source be located. By
sharing indicators of compromise associated with an incident or possible
threat, the information becomes a proactive defense for others that may include
mitigation options.

The MILE WG is focused on two areas: standardizing a data format for
representing incident and indicator data, and standardizing how
application-level protocols such as HTTPS and XMPP become substrates for
sharing the structured data. With respect to the data format, the working group
has adopted the Incident Object Description Exchange Format (IODEF, RFC 7970)
as one exchange format and will continue to:

- Revise the IODEF document to incorporate enhancements and extensions based on
operational experience. Use by the Computer Security Incident Response Teams
(CSIRTs) and others has exposed the need to extend IODEF to support industry
specific extensions, use case specific content, and representations to
associate information related to represented threats (system, threat actors,
campaigns, etc.). The value of information sharing has been demonstrated and
highlighted at an increasing rate through the success of the Information
Sharing and Analysis Centers (ISACs). In addition, the Multinational Alliance
for Collaborative Cyber Situational Awareness (CCSA) have been running
experiments to determine what data is useful to exchange between industries and
nations to effectively mitigate threats. The work of these and other groups
have identified and continue to develop data representations relevant to their
use cases that may compliment/extend IODEF.

- Provide guidance on the implementation and use of IODEF to facilitate
interoperability.

Though the working group also adopted Real-time Inter-network Defense (RID, RFC
6545) as further enabling information exchange of security policy, its
transport mechanism, based on the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), led to
the second focus for MILE: adopting more modern transport through the adoption
of a RESTful interface through ROLIE (Resource-oriented lightweight information
exchange, RFC 8322) and the adoption of a publish-subscribe model through
XMPP-Grid (draft-ietf-mile-xmpp-grid). The MILE WG will continue to:

- Update and enhance these application-level substrate protocols to optimize
their performance and representations. More explicitly, documenting how ROLIE
can transport JSON representations.

- Define and document how these application-level substrate protocols can also
be used to support other security information exchange formats. For example,
documenting how ROLIE can transport STIX (Structured Threat Information
Expression) data. As STIX is a expression format defined by the OASIS
consortium, the working group will maintain a relationship with OASIS to ensure
proper use, compatibility and interoperability when using STIX.