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Minder Monday: Deep Dive - The Minder Ontology
Introduction
Welcome to the Minder Monday update on December 16, 2024, where we explore the ontology behind the open-source control platform, Minder. This meeting was hosted by Stacy Potter, an open-source Community Manager at Stack Loock, with engineering insights shared by Oz. Minder aims to strengthen supply chain security by bringing dev and security teams together. Let's delve deeper into how Minder views its ecosystem and the concepts surrounding it.
Introduction to Minder
Minder is an open-source platform designed to enhance supply chain security. Its goal is to bridge the gap between developers and security teams by incorporating risk intelligence into existing workflows, centralizing policy control, and managing external dependency risk. Leveraging expertise in open-source systems, including Kubernetes and Sigstore, the team seeks to create better tools for the community to secure software.
Key Concepts of Minder's Ontology
Minder's architecture is crafted around specific entities, relationships, and policies.
Providers: These are external integrations that allow Minder to gather information about various parts of the software supply chain. Providers can include GitHub, GitLab, Docker Hub, etc. When you enroll a provider, you enable Minder to access these integration points, creating entities for monitoring.
Entities: Entities are distinct aspects of the supply chain, such as repositories, pull requests, or artifacts (like Docker containers). Each entity can be evaluated at specified checkpoints.
Checkpoints: Evaluation of an entity occurs at a particular point in time, represented by a timestamp plus a commit hash or a tag and digest for artifacts. This allows for a historical view of compliance and evaluation status.
Properties: Properties are characteristics of entities that provide context and information. They can be static (like an ID) or refreshing (like a repository's visibility status).
Policy: Policies define what is considered acceptable behavior within your supply chain, expressed through profiles, which are collections of rules. The policy framework consists of ingestion, evaluation, and action, which operates within the evaluation engine of Minder.
Data Sources: These allow integration with external information sources such as vulnerability databases, giving broader context to entities within the Minder platform.
Projects: Minder supports a hierarchical model for organizing entities, enabling multi-tenancy within a single account. Projects can inherit rules and profiles, promoting consistent security practices across teams.
Conclusion
Understanding these components is vital for effectively using Minder as a tool for supply chain security. By mapping relationships, configuring providers, and defining policies, users can build a robust defense mechanism against potential vulnerabilities.
Keyword
- Minder
- Ontology
- Supply Chain Security
- Providers
- Entities
- Checkpoints
- Properties
- Policy
- Data Sources
- Projects
FAQ
Q: What is Minder?
A: Minder is an open-source control platform designed to enhance supply chain security by bridging the gap between developers and security teams.
Q: What are Providers in Minder?
A: Providers are external integrations (e.g., GitHub, GitLab, Docker Hub) that allow Minder to gather information about various parts of the software supply chain.
Q: What are Entities?
A: Entities are distinct aspects of the supply chain that can include repositories, pull requests, and artifacts. They are created and managed through providers.
Q: How does Minder evaluate an Entity?
A: Evaluation occurs at specific checkpoints in time, allowing for compliance and historical analysis of an entity's status.
Q: What is the role of Policies in Minder?
A: Policies define what is acceptable within a supply chain and are implemented through rules and profiles, guiding the evaluation and action processes.