The Open Cybersecurity Alliance introduces an open source messaging framework, OpenDXL Ontology, to create a common language between cybersecurity tools
Charlie Osborne / ZDNet :
Context & Ripple Effects
In early 2020, the [[a:|Open Cybersecurity Alliance]]'s OpenDXL Ontology was one of the first attempts to give security tools a shared vocabulary: an open-source messaging framework so a detection from one vendor could be understood by another's response tooling without bespoke integrations. At the time, most products spoke only their own formats, and every customer paid for point-to-point connectors.
The idea did not stay isolated. Two years later, AWS, Splunk, IBM, CrowdStrike, Cloudflare, Okta and a dozen others launched the Open Cybersecurity Schema Framework to standardize how hacking attempts are monitored, and in 2023 OT security vendors built ETHOS, an open portal for sharing critical-infrastructure threat warnings — both descendants of the same premise OpenDXL Ontology staked out.
First-order effects
- Vendors in the alliance gain a no-cost path to interoperate: adopting the ontology means their alerts, findings and context can flow into other members' tools without building and maintaining custom connectors per partner.
- Security teams running multi-vendor stacks get earlier relief from integration tax — correlation across tools becomes a configuration task rather than a services project.
Second-order effects
- Non-member competitors face pressure to either adopt the common language or explain why their telemetry is harder to consume, shifting differentiation from data capture to analysis quality.
- Open schemas commoditize the plumbing layer, so adjacent players — SIEMs, SOAR platforms, managed service providers — compete on orchestration and insight built atop shared messages rather than on lock-in.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the industry structurally reorganizes around layered open standards — messaging vocabularies like OpenDXL Ontology, monitoring schemas like OCSF, sector portals like ETHOS — with value migrating up-stack to whoever interprets the shared data best.
- A common machine-readable language also creates the substrate regulators and certification bodies need: once tools speak the same format, mandates and audits can be expressed against it rather than against each vendor's proprietary output.
The trend: Cybersecurity is converging on shared open standards for tool-to-tool communication, with OpenDXL Ontology as an early template that later efforts like OCSF and ETHOS scaled by domain and by backing consortium.