Sirtfi is now ready for adoption!
Although computer security incident response procedures often exist at the national level, they are rarely formally specified for federations and there is no best practice guidance for security incidents involving several federations spreading across multiple administrative domains. Whilst R&E federations and their underlying IdPs have a long-standing operational tradition, and while the organisation operating federations and IdP have developed a computer security incident response capability to deal with both accidental and deliberate violations of system and network security, there are several challenges remaining. One is a 'lack of expressibility': there is no common way to express to service providers and relying parties what level of incident response capability is available, not its maturity level. Secondly, there is not even a standard way defined how to contact the incident response teams within a federation, IdP, or service provider. The meta-data specifications - whilst providing administrative, billing, and helpdesk contact, did not even suggest previously that a security contact would be useful.
This task, specifically by supporting and by working through the global group defining the Security Incident Response Trust Framework for federated Identity (Sirtfi), addresses these key area. Through the works of AARC, in close collaboration with the global community and with REFEDS, there is now a range of accepted practices and standards:
The Sirtfi category is registered according to RFC 6711 with the IANA LoA Profile Registry at http://www.iana.org/assignments/loa-profiles/ with URI https://refeds.org/sirtfi
Security incident response is also an element of the self-assessment process started for the Assurance Profile task (TNA3.1)
The incident response procedure (DNA3.2) is being eveloped now at https://docs.google.com/document/d/1I3IhatjdP5sa6Sfji8SIT6yXo4CI1tf2kNOaccD9QCU
This task also supports the work towards a globally recognised security contact in federation meta-data as part of the Sirtfi v1.0 implementation plan.
The following federations have volunteered to pilot the framework and will be among the first to test its benefits:
- CSC
- SURF net
- SWITCH
- WAYF