Component Specification: Response & Automation (SOAR)

1. Overview & Objectives

The Response & Automation (SOAR) component executes codified playbooks to accelerate incident triage, enrich investigations, and contain active security threats. To protect business operations while achieving high containment velocity, the architecture enforces a Blast-Radius Risk Tiering model that cleanly separates automated, low-risk operational steps from disruptive actions requiring human-in-the-loop authorization.

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2. Core Functional Requirements

1. Declarative Playbook Engine:

   • Code-as-configuration playbooks (JSON/YAML or TypeScript/Python workflows).
   • Stateful execution with support for branching, error handling, retries, and compensation/rollback steps.
   • Comprehensive audit logging of every step and API payload.

2. Blast-Radius Risk Classification:

   • Tier 0 (Read-Only / Enrichment):
     • Automated execution without approval.
     • Actions: Reverse DNS, WHOIS lookups, VirusTotal / ThreatConnect queries, querying directory attributes.
   • Tier 1 (Targeted Low-Disruption Containment):
     • Automated execution for high-confidence detections on non-critical assets (or pre-approved development environments).
     • Actions: Quarantining an untrusted binary hash on a single workstation, adding an IP to a temporary rate-limiting list.
   • Tier 2 (High-Impact / Disruptive Operations):
     • Enforces human-in-the-loop authorization.
     • Actions: Network isolation of a production server, tenant-wide account lockout, resetting administrator passwords, modifying perimeter BGP or global firewall rules.

3. Interactive Human-in-the-Loop Authorization:

   • Webhook integrations with SecOps collaboration tools (Slack, Microsoft Teams, PagerDuty, Web UI).
   • Rich interactive cards showing incident summary, targeted asset, blast-radius assessment, and "Approve" / "Reject" controls with reason entry.
   • Timeouts and escalation paths if no authorization is received within SLA.

4. Closed-Loop Intelligence & Detection Feedback:

   • Upon incident containment and resolution:
     • Automatically exports validated IOCs (hashes, C2 domains) to the CTI platform.
     • Flags true positive vs. false positive metrics back to the Detection-as-Code registry for threshold calibration.

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3. Reference Technology Stack Options

Sub-component	Open-Source Option	Cloud Native / Managed Option	Commercial Reference
Playbook Engine	Shuffle / Temporal / Node-RED	AWS Step Functions / Azure Logic Apps	Palo Alto Cortex XSOAR / Splunk SOAR
Integration Bus	Kafka / NATS / RabbitMQ	Amazon EventBridge / Google Cloud Pub/Sub	Tines / Torq
Approval Gateways	Slack Bolt SDK / Teams Webhooks	AWS SNS + API Gateway + Slack Bot	Tines Interactive Pages