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A way to assess the foundation of the communication channels is to run so called communication challenges, see for example https://wise-community.org/sccc/, or the reaction tests exercised in Geants GEANT TF-CSIRT.
Communication Challenge Toolset
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- a webserver with a edugain.org server certificate.
- unique url generator.
- script to generate the "personalized" challenge message send to the participants.
- evaluation is done based on analysis of web server logs (access times of the unique urls) and the timestamps of the mail send to the participants.
- the anonymized results will be available in graphical format on the webserver.
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Input
Recipients list
The security contacts email addresses will be retrieved from the eduGAIN Database using the APIs published on the technical site.
The addresses will the contact addresses for the various entities should be provided in a csv file, like:
contact@entity-1.edu,entity-1
CSV file with the following format: <Identity Federation Name>,<Email>.
The script that parses the API is available on the GEANT gitlab:
https://gitlab.geant.org/edugain/edugain-contacts/-/blob/master/identity_federations_security_contacts.pyContact email and participant is required. Ideally the contact email is a team address and is monitored by multiple people.
Mail template (participants)
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Dear {NAME},
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you have received this message to verify the security contact data set in the
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eduGAIN Database for your
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Identity Federation. Please confirm that this contact is still correct by clicking the following URL and following the instructions: https://challenge.edugain.org/{UNIQUE_URL} No further action is required except for the above. Sincerely yours,
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eduGAIN Security Team...
The content in "{ }" willbe will be automatically filled by the communication challenge tool-set based on the participants csv file.
Make sure to replace "< >" with meaningful input.
Expected results
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Communication challenge process
- prepare input files (see Needed input)
- announcement of the challenge by the entity coordinating the activities in the challenged community, ca 1 week before the run (optional)
- start the challenge, send the messages with the instructions (see mail template).
- close the challenge 1 week after sending the message, any reply taking more then a week is probably useless in incident response.
- Send the result graphic (anonymized) to recipients
- Follow up on non reacting participants, wrong contact addresses mentioned within the challenge related communications, or unexpected effects of different ticket systems eventually used by different participants.
Expected results
- list of valid contact addresses
- list of invalid contact addresses
- reaction times of the participants