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  <front>
    <journal-meta />
    <article-meta>
      <title-group>
        <article-title>A Survey of Automated Information Exchange Mechanisms Among CERTs</article-title>
      </title-group>
      <contrib-group>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Muhammd Mudassar Yamin</string-name>
          <email>muhammad.m.yamin@ntnu.no</email>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff0">0</xref>
        </contrib>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Basel Katt</string-name>
          <email>basel.katt@ntnu.no</email>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff0">0</xref>
        </contrib>
        <aff id="aff0">
          <label>0</label>
          <institution>Norwegian University of Science and Technology</institution>
          ,
          <addr-line>Teknologivegen 22, 2815 Gjøvik</addr-line>
          ,
          <country country="NO">Norway</country>
        </aff>
      </contrib-group>
      <fpage>311</fpage>
      <lpage>322</lpage>
      <abstract>
        <p>Nowadays innovative computer related exploits are released every single day, which makes researching about those exploits a significant task. A CERT (Computer Emergency Response Team) is an expert group that is responsible for handling cyber security incidents and for issuing feasible advisories and countermeasures for new vulnerabilities. There exist national CERTs and CERTs that belongs to large organizations; and the coordination among them to share knowledge of new threats and countermeasures is very essential for a timely emergency response. This can be done by a systematic information exchange process among different CERTs. The purpose of the present research paper is to give a review about automated information exchange mechanisms at CERTs. Furthermore, issues, challenges and various technologies used to automate information exchange are discussed.</p>
      </abstract>
      <kwd-group>
        <kwd>CERTs</kwd>
        <kwd>Information Exchange</kwd>
        <kwd>Autonomous</kwd>
      </kwd-group>
    </article-meta>
  </front>
  <body>
    <sec id="sec-1">
      <title>Introduction</title>
      <p>2</p>
      <p>Muhammd Mudassar Yamin, Basel Katt
– What are the control filtering mechanisms between CERTs?
– What are the limitations and problems present in automated information
sharing between CERTs?
The rest of the paper is organized in the following sections. Firstly, the authors
states a brief introduction of the automated information exchange processes
used by CERTs. Secondly, the literature related to the automated information
exchange mechanisms at CERTs is stated. Thirdly, the current status of
information exchange mechanism at CERTs is stated. Then, the authors would reflect
upon the automated information sharing process, infiltrating the boundaries of
information sharing, control filtering process and the discussion about limitation
and problems in the process of information sharing between CERTs would be
analyzed. Finally, the researcher would then conclude the paper.
2</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-2">
      <title>Related Work</title>
      <p>
        Skopik et al. in 2016 [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref3">3</xref>
        ] stated in a survey on the dimensions of collective cyber
defense through security information sharing the brief description of information
exchange mechanisms formulated by authentic bodies. The authentic bodies and
the related enterprises consist of such product significance such as how to produce
reliable security exchanging networks. Some of the examples are given as follow
– NIST guideline ”Framework for Improving Critical Infrastructure
Cybersecurity”.
– ENISA documents ”Cyber Security Information Sharing: An Overview of
Regulatory and Non-regulatory Approaches” and ”Cybersecurity
cooperation: Defending the digital frontline”.
– ISO/IEC standard 27010 ”Information technology - Security techniques
Information security management for inter-sector and inter organizational
communications”.
      </p>
      <p>– EU Network Information Security Directive.</p>
      <p>Creating a reliable and secure cyber atmosphere is a priority for all member
states of EU (European Union). This also include key internet enablers, critical
infrastructure operators, such as e-commerce platforms, social networks, and
operators in energy, transport, banking and health care services operating within
EU. EU uses the ENISA (European Network and Information Security Agency)
to help the member states and the commission by catering them with professional
help and guidance. The structure of cyber security information for the purpose of
information exchange between different networks can be formed by considering
the following factors.</p>
      <p>– Recognizing and finding out about cyber security information and
bodies. Forming reliable and information exchange policy between exchanging
CERTs.
– Pledging and reacting towards cyber security information; Ensuring the
security of the cyber security information exchange.</p>
      <p>A Survey of Automated Information Exchange Mechanisms Among CERTs
3
– Suggesting the security and quality of shared reports about cyber security
in information sharing data format, protocols and standards.</p>
      <p>After discussing the above factors of information sharing, a research centre is
formed as a reliable body consisting of security specialists, from enterprises
belonging to various information technology industries, devoted to secure the
information technology process by identifying the threats and risks in it, and
propose countermeasures. Seeking recurrent structures from event log data sets
and marginal reporting from various equipment across different locations ensure
the consideration of information across hundreds of users, applications and
protocols. It joins the given data, enabling the user to have an overview of network
activity combining log management, asset management, information from
security controls and detection systems. The EU motivates the enlargement and the
related usage of synergies between civilian and military facilities for securing the
important cyber assets by producing research and development programs and
by fostering coordination between governments, private sector and academia in
EU.</p>
      <p>
        Franke et al. in 2014 [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref4">4</xref>
        ] investigated Cyber situational awareness. A research
on cyber situational awareness was presented in eleven groups. Accordingly, the
cyber situational awareness is mostly about knowledge regarding cyber issues.
Such cyber issues need to be studied along with relevant data to get the complete
realization of a situation. Instead of talking about the complexity of situational
knowledge, majority of the available data is focused on cyber issues such as how
cyber sensors can play a part in the complete understanding of the situation, or
by focusing on the relations among particular cyber sensors in threat information
acquisition, handeling and processing. The similarity among cyber sensors and
their role in the overall situational awareness are studied, however the antonymic
similarity in which the routine sensors have got the potential to play part in the
cyber event is not covered fully. The eleven theme-based groups are discussed as
follow.
      </p>
      <p>
        – General cyber situational awareness
– Tools, architectures, and algorithms
– Information fusion
– Cyber situational awareness for industrial control systems
– Cyber situational awareness for emergency management
– Visualization for cyber situational awareness
– Human-computer interaction
– Nation-wide, large scale cyber situational awareness
– Exercises relating to cyber situational awareness
– Information exchange for cyber situational awareness
– Military cyber situational awareness
According to researchers in [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref4">4</xref>
        ] given the prominent role of high-level cyber
situational awareness in national cyber strategies, it seems that more attention
should be directed to the risk of deception. On the rather liberal interpretation
of a non-trivial empirical contribution slightly below 45% of the articles reviewed
4
were classified into this category, but it is noteworthy that only 3 out of 102
articles were found where exercises were used as vehicles to gather empirical data
on cyber situational awareness. Cyber security exercises of various kinds offer a
particularly interesting source of data on cyber situational awareness
      </p>
      <p>
        Tounsi et al. in 2017 [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref5">5</xref>
        ] stated that there is a particular interest in the
favor of threat detection, when organizations nowadays are investing to procure
different types of threat detecting tools, largely concentrating on the Technical
Threat Intelligence(TTI). The researchers have concluded that in comparison to
what was identified earlier, the quick exchanging of TTI is not enough to get
rid of persistent attacks. Security lies in effective exchange of threat information
among organizations. A standardized way for exchanging TTI reduces the risk
of losing the quality of threat data, thus enables applying automated analytics
on large bulks of TTI and the selection of the threat intelligence tool depends
upon the objectives of the organization, as in some organizations the
information processing and automatic analytics is desired. Majority of organizations
motivate the threat information exchange by enhancing support between threat
defenders. The benefits of exchanging data also consist of a good knowledge of
the situational awareness of the threat scenario. The format of threat intelligence
libraries or platforms are fabricated in such a way as that their main purpose is
to overcome the bulk of problems of TTI and to help in exchanging the threat
information with other organizations in the threat intelligence arena.
      </p>
      <p>
        Bartnes et al. in 2016 [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref6">6</xref>
        ] investigated The future of information security
incident management training and concluded that the practice for reacting to
information security events is treated with less enthusiasm and also various
bodies like business managers and technical professionals have diverse opinion about
information security. The aim of the information security incident management
training is to give resilience to the potentials of the company in response to
the events that could be helpful for business operations continuity. The human
resource element acts here as a factor for the domain of resilience
engineering, and the relation between the incident management process and resilience
engineering activity. When their is no major security events limiting the
preparatory activities, then a mark of preparation and importance is limited to event
management planning and preparation activities between cyber security officials
are restricted, specifically in comparison to the suggestions by ISO/IEC 27035.
The recommendations from the cyber security officials stated that no prodigious
information security events had been noticed that had affected their business
endeavors. Probing into information security incidents is never given much
attention as compared to other items, although the information and training are
giving more importance than the written material in the wake of an event.
Getting experience from previous events and getting ready for the upcoming events
would help to device more strategies against the threats. The experience for
getting knowledge about different tasks consists of security specialists,
acquiring new perceptions on how to solve the problems, how to make better methods,
performing the threat analysis, finding out direct causes, discussing new security
measures that are desirable, and up-gradation the risk assessments.
3
      </p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-3">
      <title>Methodology</title>
      <p>
        In order to understand the literature review of the present research paper, a
keyword-based research is employed. The researcher started with CERT and
Information Exchange with automated. The researcher investigated the following
keywords in academic databases like Google scholar, IEEE and ACM to acquire
the better understanding of the given terms [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref7">7</xref>
        ]. The researcher also made himself
familiar with the related literature on the given topic. The researcher spotted
a lot of related information but employed them in indexed research articles
only. The researchers conducted a thorough research and collected good amount
of relevant literature in an organized manner, but the repetition of literature
gathering process may yield slightly different results [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref9">9</xref>
        ]. Hence, the researchers
are including only the inclusion and exclusion criteria in the paper to lessen the
variation of results in other literature reviews.
– Articles which are published in English.
– Articles which are directly related to CERTs.
      </p>
      <p>– Articles that discusses Information exchange mechanisms in CERTs.
3.2</p>
      <sec id="sec-3-1">
        <title>Exclusion Criteria</title>
        <p>In respect of the huge amount of related data, the researchers have followed the
following exclusion criteria:
– Articles that mention CERTs to some extent but are not directly related to
it are not taken into consideration.
– The researcher also excluded conference abstracts, book reviews, conference
information, discussions, editorials, mini reviews, news, and short
communications for the survey .
3.3</p>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-3-2">
        <title>Quality of Articles</title>
        <p>The researchers have carefully gathered the relevant research articles for the
present survey. The main purpose of this exercise was to build a stance for
the survey and to extend it in the light of a specific research framework. The
researcher evaluated the related articles with the help of a pre-defined criteria
containing five quality assurance factors. The points are allocated on the scale
of one to five, in which five is considered the highest value and one the lowest.
The articles whose score topped the chart were given priority in the survey. The
researchers have employed the following criteria.</p>
        <p>– Reputation of publication channel, the publication channels which are well
known and recognized by academia scored higher in our criteria.
6</p>
        <p>Muhammd Mudassar Yamin, Basel Katt
– Citation of article, the articles which consist of more citations were given
higher score in our criteria.
– The relevance of article, content in relation to survey topic were also given
high score.
– Publication date of articles, the articles which are published recently received
higher score as compared to older articles.
– The articles in which there was more number of references used to build the
argument scored higher .
4</p>
      </sec>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-4">
      <title>Information Exchange Mechanisms Among CERTs</title>
      <p>
        During the survey we identified multiple information exchange mechanisms among
CERTs details of which is as follows:
– CybOX [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref8">8</xref>
        ]
      </p>
      <p>
        The first mechanism is The Cyber Observable expression cybox language,
produced by a wide range of industry, academia, and government
organizations all around the world. It standardizes the encoding and communication
of highly confidential information about cyber observable, whether they are
dynamic events or stateful measures observable in the operational cyber
domain. The cybox Language consists of three overarching principal objectives:
Firstly, to develop a common solution for all relevant usage cases. Secondly,
to support multiple cyber security use cases. Thirdly, to develop it in a form
that is flexible enough to offer a common solution for all cyber security use
cases requiring the ability to deal with cyber observable. The Cybox language
is defined within a set of specification documents as follows: cybox Language
Core Specification specifies the purpose, approach, conventions and usage of
the cybox language as well as the detailed language data models for the
language core and set of common types. Cybox Language defined objects
Specification restates some language basics from the Cybox Language Core
Specification as well as specifies the detailed language data models for the
official set of Cybox defined objects.
– TAXII [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref12">12</xref>
        ]
      </p>
      <p>The researchers stated that the present cyber threat information sharing
is either a time-consuming, manually processed or automation effort have
limited scope and are tied to a particular cyber threat information sharing
community or technology. As the value of cyber threat information sharing
has increased, the number and kinds of cyber threat information sharing
communities has also grown.The goals of TAXII (The Trusted Automated
exchange of Indicator Information) are to enable timely and secure sharing of
threat information both within and between cyber defender of multiple
organizations. Leveraging consensus standards to enable the sharing of actionable
indicators and more across organization and product/service boundaries
extend indicator sharing to enable robust, secure, high-volume exchanges of
significantly more expressive sets of cyber threat information. It supports a
broad range of use cases and practices common to cyber threat information</p>
      <p>
        A Survey of Automated Information Exchange Mechanisms Among CERTs
7
sharing communities. Leverage must be given to existing mature standards,
where appropriate eventual adoption by one or more international standards
organizations is required. In order to enable the automated sharing of a wide
range of threat data beyond simple threat information, atomic indicators are
also employed. Thus it requires fewer analyst-eyes needed to screen and
enable cross organization analyst collaboration on the truly challenging issues.
Standardized threat data formats and sharing implementations will achieve
these goals. As noted in the Roadmap to Intelligence-driven Information
Security, Automated data-exchange systems need to be established to remove
the dependency on specific bodies. In addition, ”harmonized standards for
representing attack information in machine-readable format, delivering it
securely, and consuming it in real time would help to enable automation.”
Additionally, as noted in Breaking Down Barriers to Collaboration in the Fight
Against Advanced Threats [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref12">12</xref>
        ]: ”There is a Lack of inter-operable standards
to describe advanced threats - The security industry has yet to align
behind a set of uniform, machine-readable standards to capture, integrate and
communicate threat information”.
– STIX [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref10">10</xref>
        ]
      </p>
      <p>
        STIX (Structured Threat Information Expression) provides a single
architecture tying together a diverse set of cyber threat information including:
cyber observables indicators, incidents adversary tactics, techniques, and
procedures. It exploits targets courses of action cyber attack campaigns by
cyber threat actors. To enable such an aggregate solution to be practical
for any single use case STIX is both flexible and extensible. The core use
cases targeted by STIX analyzing cyber threats a cyber threat analyst
reviews structured and unstructured information regarding cyber threat
activity from a variety of manual or automated input sources. By specifying
indicator patterns for cyber threats, a cyber threat analyst specifies
measurable patterns representing the observable characteristics of specific cyber
threats along with their threat context and relevant metadata for
interpreting, handling, and applying the pattern and its matching results. For
managing cyber threat response activities, cyber decision makers and cyber
operations personnel work together to prevent or detect cyber threat activity
and to investigate and respond to any detected incidences of such activity.
Cyber threat detection operations personnel apply mechanisms to monitor
and assess cyber operations in order to detect the occurrence of specific
cyber threats whether (1)in the past through examples, (2) currently ongoing
through dynamic situational awareness, or (3) through predictive
interpretation of leading indicators. A core requirement for maturing effective cyber
threat intelligence and cyber threat information sharing is the availability
of an open-standardized structured representation the cyber threat
information.
– CYBEX [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref11">11</xref>
        ]
      </p>
      <p>CYBEX (Cyber Security Information Exchange) researchers argued that
previous research did not consider any specific type of information to share
and the range of information sharing amount varies between 0 to 1.The
re8</p>
      <p>
        Muhammd Mudassar Yamin, Basel Katt
searchers have adopted a 2-stage Bayesian game considering the information
as the number of bugs and by using backward induction from previously
shared information of bugs they have derived the optimal investment
quantity and a number of bugs to share with the other firms participating in
information sharing. A dynamic cost of participation mechanism is
necessary to let both CYBEX and information sharing firms coexist in a sharing
market such that firms can take the advantage of information sharing and
CYBEX can manage the participation as well as CTI(Cyber-Threat
Intelligence) sharing. The researchers assumed that every participating firm in
CYBEX shares a constant amount of CTI. However, realistically some
rational firms may share less whereas some firms share more based on their best
interest. CYBEX introduces two different incentive parameters for two
different sharing levels that researchers called as high sharing strategy and low
sharing strategy. Differentiated sharing gain when a firm is not participating
in the sharing framework, then researchers can infer that the firm is not
interested in sharing its CTIs with others and decides to tackle cyber
security issues solely. Low sharing strategy is only favorable in two scenarios, (1)
when the firms do not get the value of their truthfully shared cyber-threat
information, and (2) when firms decide not to share all of their
information and free-ride on others’ CTIs, so that the cost of information sharing is
reduced.
– MISP [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref13">13</xref>
        ]
      </p>
      <p>
        In MISP (Malware Information Sharing Program), a user can describe an
event with multiple attributes while providing as much information as
possible, or one can only put a minimum of information for an event. The pull
mechanism allows a MISP instance to discover available events on a
connected instance and download any new or modified events. It automatically
goes through each of the event IDs that are eligible, converting them to
MISP’s JSON format and POST them to the event creation API of the
remote end. The event already exists and can be edited, while the remote
side will match the event by UUID to a local event and return the URL
that could to be used to update the event. It shows an index, description,
events, attributes, correlations found, proposals, active users, organizations,
discussion threads, discussion posts, number of instances to ease the usage
of MISP. The CIRCL (Computer Incident Response Center Luxembourg)
provides a feed of events that can be easily shared; such as OSINT events
and attributes that are classified as unclassified information that can be
distributed without any restrictions.
– Traffic Light Protocol [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref19">19</xref>
        ]
      </p>
      <p>The TLP (Traffic Light Protocol) was created by UK (United Kingdom) in
early 2000 to control the flow of information withing or outside the
organization. The protocol mark the information with 4 colors red, amber, green and
white. Information marked as red should not be shared by the recipient of
the information. Information marked as amber can be shared by the
recipient with the member of its own organization. Information marked as green</p>
      <p>A Survey of Automated Information Exchange Mechanisms Among CERTs
9
can be shared with affiliated organizations. Information marked as white can
be publicly shared.
4.1</p>
      <sec id="sec-4-1">
        <title>Automated Information Sharing</title>
        <p>
          The multinational alliance for collaborative cyber situational awareness’s for
information sharing framework was formed to describe how sensitive information
should be shared across organizations and governments. Content consumers can
generate security reports after automatically assessing devices based on
automated security content, and security information can be exchanged
automatically. The TAXII [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref12">12</xref>
          ] information exchanged is represented in the XML-based
structured threat information expression language. The US DISA(Defense
Information Systems Agency) fields XCCDF (xtensible Configuration Checklist
Description Format) [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref14">14</xref>
          ] with CPE (Common Platform Enumeration) and OVAL
(Open Vulnerability Assessment Language) [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref17">17</xref>
          ] to publish security technical
I implementation guides, which are the configuration standards for the US
Department of defense IA (Information Assurance Division) and IA-enabled devices
and systems. INCH WG (Extended Incident Handling Working Group) goal is
to define a data format, information model, and messaging format to exchange
security incident information used by CSIRTs. ICSG (Industry Connections
Security Group) work is to efficiently describe and share threat information, which
is studied in ICSG’s MMDEF (Malware Meta Data Exchange Program),
Malware, and Stop eCrime WGs [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref16">16</xref>
          ]. MMDEF WG. The MMDEF WG’s goal is to
standardize and enrich captured and shared malware information. The RESTful
architecture style can be used for resource discovery and exchange of
information represented by various data models. Even though it’s flexible, the
resourceoriented architecture is still a pull model in which threat information can’t be
distributed only to interested parties. For some countries with different privacy
laws for personally identifiable information, information collection and sharing
methods will need to be designed carefully.
4.2
        </p>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-4-2">
        <title>Crossing the Boundaries</title>
        <p>Classified information such as undersigned unclassified data and personally
identifiable information may be faced when an expert is checking cyber threat data.
The data from the intelligence are mostly written papers that discuss about the
TTPs, actors, types of systems and data being targeted, and other threat related
knowledge that are worthy of importance for a company. In order to describe the
significance of data sharing activities, companies must narrate the extent of their
data sharing activities by describing the kinds of data available for exchange, the
environment under which exchange of this data is allowed, and the bodies with
whom the data could be exchanged. A company may set regulations that could
narrow down the sharing of highly classified data with infiltrated groups, which
could permit the exchange of medium classified data with particular reliable
users, and also that allow data of less classified information to be highlighted in
the range of packed sharing group, and also that permit the unhindered sharing
10</p>
        <p>
          Muhammd Mudassar Yamin, Basel Katt
of non-classified data in national data exchanging platforms. The secrecy effect
level as described in NIST SP 800-122 [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref18">18</xref>
          ] and 800-150 [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref19">19</xref>
          ] is a productive tool
for getting the classified data to be secured.
4.3
        </p>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-4-3">
        <title>Control Filtering Mechanism between CERTs</title>
        <p>
          When a company signs a pact for data exchanging policy, earlier it must get the
approval from the administrative team, who should must have a specific system
for checking the data sharing activities and for handling the tools essential for the
company’s data exchanging assist. NIST SP 800-150 [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref19">19</xref>
          ] GUIDE TO CYBER
THREAT INFORMATION SHARING discusses the control filtering process for
the judicial team and the one with the authorization to come into contact with
the privacy officers and other significant stakeholders who play their part in the
collection, ingestion, storage, analysis, publication, or protection of threat data.
Majority of companies can get threat data by the channels of email lists, text
alerts, and web portals in the absence of autonomous mechanism related to data
sharing. Though the material obtained by these production ways could also be
handed manually. A creator of exchanged threat data could make his mind what
device could be used in case any metadata is assisting exchanged data, what
data patterns could be used, how the classified data could be handled, and in
which way data exchanging regulations can be upgraded with the passage of
time. A measured non-sensitive data is the one for which the laws, regulations
and government policy need to have ways of protection or disintegrating controls,
that are taking out the data which are sensitive.
4.4
        </p>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-4-4">
        <title>Limitations and Problems</title>
        <p>
          Innovative researches in the field of technology play a significant part for CERTs,
and the method is also important by which specifically nation-wide CERTs have
to work and the way they react with other bodies. International cyber security
rules can be viewed as a method of lessening the threats of cyber security events,
and the progress of event responses as well. The Internet is a huge system and
it shows that CERTs must establish contacts to perform their task of incident
reporting. The first ever CERT, CERT/CC was made to undergo coordinating
role, afterwards CERTs have a way of establishing contact that is also
strengthened by the RFC 2350 [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref20">20</xref>
          ], which illustrates a mini design to show the activities
of a CERT. Different helpers are present to discuss how to set up a CERT e.g.
from ENISA or the NIST publication Security Incident Handling Guide, where
the communication area is also discussed briefly. The complete new method
is that the part of CERTs, especially national CERTs is limited in a narrow
connecting manner. An eye catching dimension of CERTs is that not only the
national CERTs might be taking into consideration but all CERTs are held
responsible for important security incidents and digital service providers. CERTs
need to maintain contact to fulfill their compulsory supporting process. Helping
this communication should be according to the political arena. There are several
hindering elements in this regard as well. The new part that CERTs assume in
        </p>
        <p>A Survey of Automated Information Exchange Mechanisms Among CERTs
11
national and international cyber security strategies puts forward tough questions
in regard to the support of national security interests versus the interest of global
cyber security. The handling of this situation cannot be completely overcome by
technical support measures alone, it also needs a strategic approach to encounter
it as well.
5</p>
      </sec>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-5">
      <title>Conclusion</title>
      <p>The conclusion drawn from the above survey is that there are various information
exchange platforms already existing among different CERTs. But the exchange
of data is dependent upon the significance of the data and the importance of the
strategic data for the receivers. For a collective defense mechanism, political
obstacles should be removed so that nationwide CERTs could cooperate with each
other in a productive manner in the wake of political conflicts. The new processes
reflect that categorizing the data independently will enhance the performance
of present automatic information exchange process among CERTs. This would
make the exchange of data easier which would lessen the risk of threat exploiting
and vulnerability and would increase the defense power of information sharing
CERTs collectively.</p>
      <p>Muhammd Mudassar Yamin, Basel Katt</p>
    </sec>
  </body>
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