1. Goals of Context Discovery

To fill the gap left by the OpenC2 specifications, a new Actuator Profile has been introduced with the goal to abstract the services that are running into the network, the interactions between them and the security features that they implement. Identifying a service involves determining its type and the specific characteristics of that type. The service also provides essential information, such as hostname, encoding format, and transfer protocol, for connecting to it and to any linked services. In this way, the context in which the service is operating is identified. This new Actuator Profile has been named “Context Discovery”, herein referred as CTXD, with the nsid “x-ctxd”.

The Context Discovery employs a recursive function to achieve this task, querying each digital resource to determine its features. Thus, once the Producer has obtained from the Consumer the information on how to connect to the digital resources linked to the Consumer, it will query each new digital resource to determine its features, thereby producing a map.

The Context Discovery profile is implemented on the Consumer side and is one of the possible Actuator Profiles that the Consumer can support. Communication follows the OpenC2 standard, where a Producer sends a Command specifying that the Actuator to execute it is CTXD. If the Consumer implements CTXD, it will return a Response.