A Distributed Security Announcement Authoring System with CAIF Support

Abstract

Many Security Teams issue Security Announcements (aka Advisories) to their constituencies to provide them with up-to-date information about security problems in soft- or hardware and their mitigation by applying workarounds or patches. To be able to use the benefits of advanced document formats designed for this task, like the Common Announcement Interchange Format (CAIF), powerful software, that also implements an authoring process, is is a prerequisite. This article describes the architecture of and the authoring process implemented by a distributed authoring system based on but not limited to CAIF. It presents the parts of the system API to adapt, further develop, and integrate existing authoring systems, like the SIRIOS[4] System into the distributed authoring process, based on web-service and classic RPC technology.