CS-CONNECT

Inside CS-CONNECT: The open-source technology powering cybersecurity collaboration

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.

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What is CS-CONNECT? A new approach to cybersecurity collaboration

In a world where cyber threats are becoming increasingly sophisticated and interconnected, collaboration between organisations and regions is essential. That’s where CS-CONNECT comes in.

Developed as part of the CS-AWARE NEXT project and funded by the European Union’s Horizon Europe programme, CS-CONNECT is an innovative platform. Its main goal is to support local and regional cybersecurity collaboration by offering a dynamic environment in which organisations can share and review information, co- create security policies and respond quickly to cybersecurity incidents.

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CS-Connect first steps!

CS-Connect first steps!

As you may remember, one of the many exciting outcomes of CS-AWARE-NEXT is the collaboration platform that has been baptized CS-Connect in the Wien meeting! CS-Connect is a collaboration layer for the ecosystem, aimed to support the organisations in their activities toward improved security.

We have collected the requirements and are now deciding what is the current basis for the development and overcoming different technological challenges. We have selected several Open Collaboration Platforms (CPs) to study and evaluate. The objective is to select the one that is best suitable for us to build CS-Connect on top, using the traditional and well-established open source development model of “Standing on the shoulder of giants” which is to guarantee quick prototyping, software stability and resiliency, as well as sustainability of complex software projects.

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Welcome CS-Connect!

In CS-AWARE-NEXT, the role of our unit, CERICT-Università di Salerno, is to design, develop and evaluate, a collaboration layer for the ecosystem, aimed to support the organisations in their activities toward improved security.

We are actually collecting all the requirements from the use cases and we have had very interesting discussions with the organisations in the ecosystems in Larissa and in Foggia, to find out what is actually needed to ensure adequate support to the ecosystem. And indeed, we have collected quite a few requirements, some of which were expected by us (aren’t we all collaborating on something after all) but many were surprising and stimulating. We cannot spoil them as they are going to be in the Deliverable that Workpackage 2 is creating by February 2023. For example, we cannot tell you that we are considering different scenarios that involve the ecosystem in different activities, with different tools and different support by the collaboration system. As well as we cannot tell you that a flexible visibility mechanism for the information shared will allow to accommodate different ecosystem with diverse cohesion. And, of course, we cannot tell you that the visualization of the system will be based on the CS-AWARE visualization but contextualized with the goal of the scenario. Sorry. What we can tell you now is what is the name of the tool! In fact, during the General Meeting in Wien, stimulated by the words, dubiously attributed to the Bard of Avon:

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