Skip to content

Write up the "SSVC as human-scale bottleneck" concept #1033

@ahouseholder

Description

@ahouseholder

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

Internal to the SSVC team, we've been talking for a few years about the idea that SSVC can act as a human-scale bottleneck to decision planning sitting between large-scale data collection on one side and large-scale vulnerability response on the other. The human scale aspect of SSVC is that it allows the conversation between risk owners and technical implementers about What should we do when...? This part happens in the Prepare step of the Getting Started guide, but we don't really call it out there for what it is.

Describe the solution you'd like

Write up an explainer about how SSVC enables the conversation and allows for a governance process to be effective in the face of a lot of data and operational level decisions being made in the course of ongoing operations. Examples could include (just tossing out ideas):

  • "Why did we do $X$?" → "Because our data indicated that conditions $A$, $B$, and $C$ were met." → "Well let's fine-tune that, because I think we should have done $Y$ in that case" → "Okay, should we add another condition $D$ to every decision, or should we just re-label the outcome for the node where $(A,B,C)$ happens?" → etc.
  • Data Mapping is really geared toward funneling things into the bottleneck from the left
  • Use & Respond is about fanning out the model into operational use
flowchart TB

subgraph dm[Data Mapping]
    collect[Collect Lots of Data]
end
subgraph ssvc[SSVC<br/>Human-Scale]
    dps[SSVC Decision Points]
    model[SSVC Decision Table]
end
subgraph use[Respond]
    apply[Decisions]
end
gov[Governance<br/>Human-Scale]
collect -->|maps<br/>onto| dps
dps -->|input to| model
model -->|defines| apply
gov -->|refines| ssvc
use -->|informs| gov
Loading

Metadata

Metadata

Assignees

No one assigned

    Labels

    content/semanticChanges to the semantic content of the SSVC documentationenhancementNew feature or request

    Type

    No type

    Projects

    No projects

    Milestone

    No milestone

    Relationships

    None yet

    Development

    No branches or pull requests

    Issue actions