Behaviours

Jitsuin Archivist supports a wide range of cyber-physical assets with very different capabilities and properties: some will have simple firmware maintenance lifecycles; others may have complex software configurations to manage; and yet others may have significant physical maintenance requirements to meet.

‘Behaviours’ are the technical mechanism through which Asset Records (and by extension estate security and compliance posture) are managed. Behaviours represent aspects of the asset lifecycle such as firmware updates or physical maintenance.

Within each behaviour there is a set of ‘operations’ which update the asset’s service history and create the basis for the shared evidence base for compliance insights, patch performance and so on.

Declaring allowed Behaviours

In order to maintain integrity of assets’ service histories and the overall security and compliance posture of an estate it is necessary to restrict which behaviours are pertinent to each asset, and therefore what statements can be made about the asset’s lifecycle. It is therefore necessary to supply a list of allowed behaviours when first creating the Asset Record.

System-defined attributes

Certain asset attributes are manipulated and interpreted by the system in order to provide compliance and security insights for the asset. In order to get the best benefit from the Archivist it is essential to take care to handle these properties carefully and consistently when passing them to behaviours operations.

All asset properties with an arc_ prefix are used for system-defined purposes. Most operations also support custom properties which can have arbitrary names, though it is recommended to adopt a naming scheme which minimizes chances of collisions or confusion with other clients in the value chain.