Towards efficient collaboration in cyber security

Abstract

Cyber security analysts in different geographical and organizational domains are often largely tasked with similar duties, albeit with domain-specific variations. These analysts necessarily perform much of the same work independently- for instance, analyzing the same list of security bulletins released by largely the same set of software vendors. As such, communication and collaboration between such analysts would be mutually beneficial to the analysts involved, potentially reducing redundancy and offering the opportunity to preemptively alert each other to high-severity security alerts in a more timely fashion. However, several barriers to practical and efficient collaboration exist, and consequently, no such framework exists to support these efforts. In this paper, we discuss the inherent difficulties which make efficient collaboration between cyber security analysts a difficult goal to achieve. We discuss preliminary ideas and concepts towards a collaborative cyber-security framework currently under development, whose goal is to facilitate analyst collaboration across these boundaries. While still in its early stages, we describe work-in-progress towards achieving this goal, including motivation, functionality, concepts, and a high-level description of the proposed system architecture.