By UNISA/CeRICT June 24, 2025
At the core of CS-CONNECT stands a clear technical vision: to enable seamless, data-driven collaboration via a customisable, sustainable platform.
To this end, the CS-CONNECT team selected Mattermost, an open-source collaboration platform renowned for its extensibility, as the foundation. Mattermost’s robust plugin system and active developer community make it ideal for building custom features to meet the unique requirements of cybersecurity collaboration.
One of CS-CONNECT’s key innovations is the HOOD (Hyperlinked Object-Oriented Discussion) methodology. This approach enables users to link specific data points (e.g. a field in a policy or an event in a timeline) directly within chat messages. It’s like being able to ‘point’ at data during a digital conversation, helping teams to maintain context and clarity, even in complex discussions.
The architecture is modular and scalable, leveraging:
- Mattermost for communication and authentication.
- A declarative configuration to define data and the way they are visualised.
- Widgets and dashboards to visualise and interact with structured data.
- REST APIs and external data providers to integrate real-time information from other CS-AWARE NEXT modules.
This architecture ensures that CS-CONNECT is flexible enough to support a wide variety of collaborative cybersecurity scenarios, ranging from incident response coordination to joint policy creation. Thanks to its open-source foundation, developers can customise the platform to meet their needs, ensuring long-term adaptability and impact.