Background

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 associated 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.

Scope

The purpose of the Incident Handling (INCH) working group is to define
a data format for exchanging security incident information used by a
CSIRT. A CSIRT is defined broadly as an entity (either a team or
individual) with a security role or responsibility for a given
constituency (e.g., organization, network).

The use case for the INCH WG output is to standardize the information
model and messaging format currently used in communication between a
CSIRT and the:

• constituency (e.g., users, customers) from which it receives reports
  of misuse;

• other parties involved in an incident (e.g., technical contact at an
  attacking site, other CSIRTs); and

• analysis centers performing trending across broad data-sets.

These INCH developed formats will replace the now largely human-
intensive communication processes common in incident handling. The
working group will address the issues related to representing and
transporting:

• the source(s) and target(s) of system misuse, as well as the
  analysis of their behavior;

• the evidence to support this analysis;

• status of an incident investigation and analysis process; and

• meta-information relevant to sharing sensitive information across
  administrative domains (e.g., internationalization, authorization,
  privacy).

Constraints

The WG will not attempt to define

• • an incident taxonomy;
• • an archive format for incident information;
• • a format for workflow process internal to a CSIRT; or
• • a format for computer security related information for which there
    is already a working standard.

Output of Working Group

1. A set of high-level requirements for a data format to represent
   information commonly exchanged by CSIRTs.

2. A specification of an extensible, incident data description language
   that describes a format that satisfies these requirements (Output #1).

3. A set of sample incident reports and their associate representation
   in the incident data language.

4. A message format specification and associated transport binding to
   carry the encoded description of an incident (Output #2).

5. Guidelines for implementing the data format (Output #2) and
   associated communications (Output #4)