On the Design of a Cyber Security Data Sharing System

The need for more fluent information sharing has been recognized for years as a major requirement by the cyber security community. Information sharing at present is mostly a slow, inefficient, and manual process that in many cases uses non-structured data sources. It is true that several cyber security data sharing tools have emerged and are currently available, but they provide only partial solutions and their use is restricted to small communities. Quite frequently, information exchanges originate and continually depend on the willingness and actions of individuals, rather than being the result of management decisions and relying on enterprise-class systems or services. Before further time is spent developing new data sharing tools that do not fully cover the needs of the community, the current difficulties with cyber security data sharing should be analyzed. Based on the results of such an analysis, state-of-the-art solutions enabling the design of systems that address these challenges must be sought. Only then will it be possible to build a cyber security data sharing system that provides fluent data sharing to the community. This paper presents an analysis of four of the major challenges to cyber security information sharing and highlights technical solutions based on the current state-of-the-art that would overcome them. The concepts described in this paper, once implemented, would provide the basic building blocks for developing a highly effective cyber security data sharing system.