Cybersecurity/Network and Information security

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Mateusz Zych

Description of Activities

The fellowship addressed key limitations found in version 2.0 of the OASIS Collaborative Automated Course of Action Operations (CACAO) standard. While CACAO v2.0 introduced the first machine-readable format for cybersecurity playbooks, real-world use revealed gaps that limited interoperability and automation. The most critical issues included ambiguous schema elements, unclear execution semantics, and limited support for graphical and modular representations needed to visualize and exchange playbooks. From a European standpoint, these shortcomings directly affected operations. SOCs, CSIRTs, and critical infrastructure operators faced difficulties creating executable playbooks, hindering the coordinated responses envisioned by the NIS2 Directive, the Cyber Solidarity Act, and the EU Cyber Crisis Blueprint.

The fellowship, therefore, focused on three main goals:
1. Consolidating feedback from European and international stakeholders who implemented CACAO v2.0.
2. Designing and drafting CACAO v3.0 — a major revision introducing structural schema improvements, more precise execution semantics, and modular extensibility.
3. Aligning the work with EU cybersecurity policy and operational priorities so that standardized, machine-readable playbooks can support coordinated preparedness and response.

The effort resulted in the ongoing working CACAO v3.0 Draft Specification and accompanying validation outputs, now progressing toward formal adoption within OASIS. By resolving the main technical and semantic issues, the fellowship strengthened Europe’s role in cybersecurity standardization. It established a solid, vendor-neutral foundation for automated, collaborative cyber defense across the EU.
 

Country
Norway
Impact on SMEs (9th Open Call)
The development of CACAO v3.0 directly benefits European SMEs by reducing technical and financial barriers to adopting advanced cybersecurity practices. The standard’s open and vendor-neutral design allows smaller organizations to integrate automated playbooks into their operations without relying on costly, proprietary tools. This strengthens their incident response capabilities and helps them meet the security and reporting obligations set out in the NIS2 Directive and the Cyber Solidarity Act.
Beyond SMEs, CACAO v3.0 enhances resilience across European digital infrastructure by enabling harmonized, machine-readable playbooks that support faster, coordinated responses to incidents affecting critical services such as energy, healthcare, and public administration.
Impact on society (9th Open Call)
The fellowship directly supports Europe’s goals for cyber resilience, digital sovereignty, and trust in critical infrastructure. By improving CACAO’s technical maturity and usability, the work enables more organizations—especially SMEs and public-sector entities—to adopt standardized, automated cybersecurity playbooks without reliance on proprietary technologies.

The resulting CACAO v3.0, with better schematics and semantics specification, offers easier, more coordinated responses to cyber incidents, reducing disruption to essential services such as healthcare, energy, and transport. It also reinforces cross-border cooperation and preparedness through machine-readable, reusable response procedures, enabling Member States and operators of essential services to collaborate under shared frameworks like NIS2 and the Cyber Solidarity Act.

Ultimately, this work enhances Europe’s capacity to defend against complex threats while fostering open collaboration, transparency, and interoperability—key enablers of a secure and digitally independent European society
Open Call
Organisation type
Organization
University of Oslo
Portrait Picture
Mateusz Zych
Proposal Title (9th Open Call)
CACAO v3.0: Enhancing Interoperable Cybersecurity Playbooks for EU-wide Response
Standards Development Organisation
StandICT.eu Year
2026

Godred Fairhurst

Description of Activities

This was a one-shot contribution to provide travel support for participation to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), and specifically participation at the July 2025 plenary meeting in Madrid. I attended this meeting as an Internet Transport expert contributing work and progressing standards to support the evolution of the Internet and its support for enhanced resilience, authentication and privacy. An in-person attendance at the technical sessions also allowed me to progress the work for which I am an editor: Qlog draft-ietf-tsvwg-careful-resume-qlog, a transport specification based on the “qlog” specification being developed by the IETF QUIC; and a recent work item in the IETF Congestion Control working group, “Increase of the Congestion Window when the Sender Is Rate-Limited” (draft-ietf-ccwg-ratelimited-increase). In-person participation at this meeting is particularly important in my current role as an Area Director of the WIT Area, where I will help organise and oversee the meeting as a whole and specifically support the WIT area WG chairs in organising WG sessions and supporting cross area review of emerging specifications.

Country
United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (the)
Impact on society (8th Open Call)
Development of new IETF secure and resilient standards are important for a digital society. Since the last IETF plenary meeting 74 documents had been approved for publication in the last quarter and 83 RFCs had been published. Two new IAB workshops were announced: Joint
IAB/W3C Workshop on Age-Based Restrictions on Content Access and an IAB Workshop on IP Geolocation. The importance of standards was evident in serval meetings co-located with IETF-123. This including meetings with policy and regulators, a meeting on Multi-Stakeholder Forum on Internet Standards Deployment accompanied by an IEPG presentation by Rüdiger Martin of the Internet Governance Team from DG-CNECT, EU. This outlines plans around NIS2, and sought to develop understanding of challenges and barriers, provide timelines for deployments of protocols at scale and best current practice. The transport system is primarily concerned with robustness and resilience to disruption of the Internet service. IETF participants had various insights into the roll-out of new standards and the implications of the new regulatory landscape.
Impact on society (9th Open Call)
The IETF is the principal Internet SDO. IETF standards and guidelines are important to Broadband Infrastructure, ensuring resilience and security of Internet data.
The standards published by the IETF define the software, protocols, and practices implemented by equipment vendors and operators. When adopted by industry, these standards will be deployed by international companies such as Apple, Google, Meta, Cloudflare and others. Specifications in the working groups for which I am the responsible Area Director include: Differentiated Services, new transport protocol mechanisms and the effects of pervasive encryption, protocol design, network infrastructure operation. It is important that new specifications consider user privacy, security, resilience and robustness to build the next generation of Internet applications and service.
Open Call
Organisation type
Organization
University of Aberdeen
Portrait Picture
Godred Fairhurst
Proposal Title (8th Open Call)
Support for IETF transport protocol standardisation at the July 2025 Plenary Meeting
Proposal Title (9th Open Call)
Travel Support for the Montreal Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) plenary meeting
Standards Development Organisation
StandICT.eu Year
2026
Topic (9th Open Call)

XACML

Cybersecurity, OSI - Open System Interconnections. XACML is expected to address fine grained control of authorized activities, the effect of characteristics of the access requestor, the protocol over which the request is made, authorization based on classes of activities, and content introspection (i.e. authorization based on both the requestor and potentially attribute values within the target where the values of the attributes may not be known to the policy writer). XACML is also expected to suggest a policy authorization model to guide implementers of the authorization mechanism."

OASIS Privacy Management Reference Model (PMRM) TC

The OASIS PMRM TC works to provide a standards-based framework that will help business process engineers, IT analysts, architects, and developers implement privacy and security policies in their operations. PMRM picks up where broad privacy policies leave off. Most policies describe fair information practices and principles but offer little insight into actual implementation. PMRM provides a guideline or template for developing operational solutions to privacy issues. It also serves as an analytical tool for assessing the completeness of proposed solutions and as the basis for establishing categories and groupings of privacy management controls.

OASIS Common Security Advisory Framework (CSAF) TC

The OASIS CSAF Technical Committee is chartered to make a major revision to the Common Vulnerability Reporting Framework (CVRF) under a new name for the framework that reflects the primary purpose: a Common Security Advisory Framework (CSAF). TC deliverables are designed standardize existing practice in structured machine-readable vulnerability-related advisories and further refine those standards over time.

OASIS Key Management Interoperability Protocol (KMIP) TC

The OASIS KMIP TC works to define a single, comprehensive protocol for communication between encryption systems and a broad range of new and legacy enterprise applications, including email, databases, and storage devices. By removing redundant, incompatible key management processes, KMIP will provide better data security while at the same time reducing expenditures on multiple products.

Information technology - Security techniques - Guidelines for the analysis and interpretation of digital evidence (ISO/IEC 27042:2015)

This standard provides a guide for the analysis and interpretation of digital data in a way that highlights problems related to continuity, validity, reproducibility and repeatability. It encompasses the best practices for selecting, designing and implementing sufficient information analysis and registration processes to allow processes to be subjected to independent review if necessary. It also provides guidance on the appropriate mechanisms to demonstrate the professionalism and competence of the investigation team.

EN ISO/IEC 27042:2016

Information technology - Security techniques - Guidance on assuring suitability and adequacy of incident investigative method (ISO/IEC 27041:2015)

The standard provides a guideline on the mechanisms to ensure that the methods and processes used in the investigation of information security incidents are "fit for purpose". It contains the best practices regarding the definition of the requirements, the description of the methods, and demonstration of how the implementation of the methods can satisfy the requests. It also includes considerations on how vendors and third parties can be used to help this warranty process.

EN ISO/IEC 27041:2016

Information technology - Security techniques - Guidelines for identification, collection, acquisition and preservation of digital evidence (ISO/IEC 27037:2012)

The standard defines the specific guidelines for the management of digital data which are the identification, collection, acquisition and preservation of digital evidence that can be of probative value. This standard provides guidance to individuals regarding common situations encountered during the processing of digital data and assists organizations in their disciplinary procedures and in facilitating the exchange of potential digital evidence between jurisdictions.

EN ISO/IEC 27037:2016

Information technology - Security techniques - Code of practice for information security controls (ISO/IEC 27002:2013 including Cor 1:2014 and Cor 2:2015)

The standard provides guidelines for the security standards of organizational information and information security management practices, including the selection, implementation and management of controls, taking into account the risk environment for the security of the organisation information.

EN ISO/IEC 27002:2017

Information technology - Security techniques - Information security management systems - Overview and vocabulary (ISO/IEC 27000:2016)

This document provides a standardized IoT Reference Architecture using a common vocabulary, reusable designs and industry best practices. It uses a top down approach, beginning with collecting the most important characteristics of IoT, abstracting those into a generic IoT Conceptual Model, deriving a high level system based reference with subsequent dissection of that model into the four architecture views (functional view, system view, networking view and usage view) from different perspectives.

EN ISO/IEC 27000:2017