Type System
One design goal of VAST is being expressive enough to capture the semantics of the domain. This led us to develop a rich type system for structured security data, inspired by the data model of the Zeek network security monitor.
Every type has zero or more attributes, which are free-form key-value pairs to enrich types with custom semantics. Fundamentally, types support aliasing, which means you can give an existing type a new name. All types, including aliases, share a global identifier namespace. In this namespace, type names must be unique.
There exist two major classes of types:
- Basic: stateless types with a static structure and a-priori known representation
- Complex: stateful types that carry additional runtime information
The diagram below illustrates the type system:
There exists a one-to-one mapping of VAST's type system to Arrow's type system to ensure that transferred data is self-describing:
Note that VAST attaches attributes to a top-plevel type instance, where Arrow only allows type meta data for record fields. VAST converts enum, adress, and subnet types to extension-types.
If you want to learn more about why VAST uses Apache Arrow, please read our blog post that explains why we use Arrow as corner stone for data interoperability and representation of the security domain model.