The technology will be open sourced in stages, beginning with the client. A new software development kit for DXL has been released into beta.
Chris Young, SVP and GM of the Intel Security Group
LAS VEGAS – Today, at the Intel Security Focus 16 event, Intel Security announced that the McAfee Data Exchange Layer (DXL) will be opened up, both through an open source strategy and the beta release of a new SDK for DXL. The objective here is to massively expand the technology’s use.
DXL is a messaging bus which provides a standardized application framework for the sharing of threat intelligence in real time, across vendors, which Intel Security first introduced two years ago. At last year’s event, Intel Security announced a series of partnerships around it.
“We have over 125 partners in SIA [the Intel Security Innovation Alliance] today, almost all of whom are integrated with McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator and DXL,” said Chris Young, SVP and GM of the Intel Security Group, in the opening keynote at Focus. “We are opening up DXL” – he said to cheers from the audience – “making it available for the entire industry. We have done that because you have asked us to do it.”
Brian Dye, corporate vice president in the Intel Security Group and general manager of the group’s global security products, provided further detail about the decision to open source DXL.
“While DXL has been needed for 15 years, the historical problem has been where organizations have been worried about putting their future in someone else’s hands,” he said. “Using DXL, they believed, would have put their future in our hands. So we decided to open source DXL.”
That will be a multi-stage process, Dye said.
“We will start with the client, and open source the rest over time,” he said. To this end, a new software development kit for DXL is going into beta.
The goal of the OpenDXL initiative is to massively expand access and capabilities of the DXL SDK and the management and community infrastructure that will support it.
“You will do yourselves a disservice if you don’t ask every vendor to integrate with this,” Young told his keynote audiences. “There are no excuses now, It’s open. Anyone can use it. You don’t have to join SIA to use it. You, as individuals can use it too, as many of you are technical. We want more hands on that technology.”
Intel Security has announced that the site where the SDK can be downloaded is https://github.com/opendxl. It is now live.
