SOARCA

Organisations are increasingly automating threat and incident response through playbook driven security workflow orchestration. The essence of this concept is that specific security events trigger a predefined series of response actions that are executed with no or only limited human intervention. These automated workflows are captured in machine-readable security playbooks, which are typically executed by a so called Security Orchestration, Automation and Response (SOAR) tool. The market for SOAR solutions has matured significantly over the past years and present day products support sophisticated automation workflows and a wide array of integrations with external security tools and data resources. Typically, however, the technology employed is proprietary and not easily adaptable for research and experimentation purposes. SOARCA aims to offer an open-source alternative for such solutions that is free of vendor dependencies and supports standardized formats and technologies where applicable.

SOARCA was developed for research and innovation purposes and allows SOC, CERT and CTI professionals to experiment with the concept of playbook driven security automation. It is open and extensible and its interfaces are well-defined and elaborately documented. Importantly, it offers native support for the emerging technology standards CACAOv2 and OpenC2, both developed and maintained by OASIS Open. CACAO (Collaborative Automated Course of Action Operations) provides a standardized scheme for machine-readable security playbooks while OpenC2 offers a standardized language for the command and control of cyber defense technologies (e.g. firewalls or IAM solutions).