Community Orchestration Via Cerebrate

The talk introduces Cerebrate, an open-source tool built within an EU-funded project to help information-sharing communities manage their members and interconnections. The speaker describes the problems that grow with large, diverse communities: keeping track of who the partners are, finding the right CERT for a compromised system, resolving clashing identifiers when organisations join several communities, and setting up links between MISP instances by hand, which is slow and error-prone.

The middle of the talk walks through how the tool works. Cerebrate nodes exchange metadata about organisations, individuals, PGP keys and sharing groups. Two nodes can agree to interconnect through a request and confirmation handshake, after which the tool instructs the MISP instances on each side to set up the sync link, and the data then flows through the native APIs. Communities can define custom metadata libraries, connectors can manage other tools, and user management, auditing and an API are included. An opt-in public listing of organisations and a planned distinction between trusted upstream sources and ordinary feeds were also presented.

For practitioners, the main takeaway is that contact, key and sharing-group coordination can be centralised instead of run through email exchanges, though trust between members still depends on building relationships over time. The speaker closes with the roadmap, which covers signing and encrypting sharing groups, further integrations such as ticketing and messaging, and a shared codebase that will move MISP onto the same stack.