WAS-XML

[Mark Curphey <mark () curphey com>]

I just wanted to let you all know about a new Technical Commitee that I am chairing that has been formed at OASIS 
(http://www.oasis-open.org). 

Web Application Security XML (WAS-XML)
The original Call For Participation for this TC may be found at 
http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/tc-announce/200305/msg00002.html

The charter for this TC is as follows.

Name

OASIS Web Application Security XML (WAS-XML) Technical Committee

Statement of Purpose

Like many other parts of the IT industry, the information security industry has grown extremely fast with few standards 
bodies and often little co-operation and co-ordination between vendors and the user community.

When security researchers and software vendors publish security advisories, they usually do so in an ambiguous textual 
form or embed the data into a proprietary data file that only works with their own proprietary security tools. The same 
vulnerability can be (and often is) described in several different ways, using different language and context, 
quantifying the impact and threat and therefore the risk in different ways and with different ratings assessments. This 
textual data can also not be used to provide automated immediate protection by web security assessment and intrusion 
protection tools.

The WAS-XML technical committee will produce;

a classification scheme for web security vulnerabilities 
a model to provide guidance for initial threat, impact and therefore risk ratings 
an XML schema to describe web security conditions that can be used by both assessment and protection tools 
The technical committee will unite industry consensus and provide standards from which vendors and users will benefit. 
It will leverage and extend the work of the OWASP VulnXML project that has been established for over a year. The 
existing VulnXML work is being given to OASIS as part of this proposal.

We will liaise with the OASIS AVDL TC whose mission is to develop communication protocols for application security 
tools to integrate. There is a clear distinction between the description of the data and the subsequent 
inter-technology communication of it and given the substantial work and thought already undertaken, the WAS-XML TC will 
leverage that and focus on the data portion of this problem. The proposers of this TC anticipate that the AVDL 
specification will consume WAS-XML data.

List of Deliverables

Web Security Classification Scheme - within 12 weeks of TC formation 
Web Security Risk Ranking Model - within 16 weeks of TC formation 
WAS-XML Schema (fully documented) - within 24weeks of TC formation 
WAS-XML Developers Guide - within 24 weeks of TC formation 
WAS-XML Overview for Security Researchers and Software Vendors - within 24 weeks of TC formation

There is a public comments list for non-OASIS members at was-comment () lists oasis-open org