Introducing RMIF, the Responsible Messaging Interoperability Framework

We’d like to introduce a new Mattermost capability we’re developing to maximize your investments in Microsoft infrastructure while protecting your data against leakage, your users from harmful content, and ensuring your organization’s policies are enforced.   

We call it RMIF — the Responsible Messaging Interoperability Framework — an extensible framework for adding protections, transformations, and filters to information processed in Mattermost.

Our initial version enhances the Mattermost for Microsoft Teams integration released with Mattermost v10.0 and demonstrates our commitment to working with customers, partners, and the open source community on secure and responsible use of Mattermost. 

Let’s talk about a typical use case for RMIF. Many organizations use Microsoft Teams for general communications and use Mattermost for their secure operations teams. Our new Mattermost for Microsoft Teams integration enables messages and notifications to go from anyone in Teams to users in Mattermost. This is great to keep everyone connected, including developers and incident response teams. But there are still times when you need to be careful about data security.

Imagine your organization is experiencing a critical cyber incident and your response team is working on analyzing and neutralizing the threat. They are using a Mattermost Cyber Incident Response Playbook to analyze the situation, collect and share evolving information, link into other systems such as Jira, and follow a procedure that meets the security, compliance, legal, and reporting guidelines for your organization.  

A lot of planning and effort went into creating a secure environment where your team can execute exactly the right procedure to get you back up and running quickly while also meeting your regulatory requirements.

It’s normal that when things get stressful, people take shortcuts that can lead to more trouble. Imagine that — in the middle of an incident — a senior manager tries to help by sending a set of suspicious files and the URL for the source website from her Teams account to the Incident Response team in Mattermost. Instead of speeding up the resolution, this could make things worse by infecting the response team, too.

RMIF is designed to prevent this risk. It’s an extensible security and policy protection framework for Mattermost where customers and partners can add their preferred security tools for analyzing, processing, and filtering Mattermost content.  

In this example, RMIF detects the URL and files in the Teams message and diverts them for analysis. RMIF checks the URL and files with the Microsoft Azure Defender service before allowing them into Mattermost. Only safe content is allowed by RMIF.  Anything dangerous is blocked and logged, and the recipient is notified of the activity. Thanks to RMIF, our incident team remains protected and can continue to work on resolving the event.  

Customers and partners can extend and customize RMIF with their own preferred security tools. We’ve implemented the general framework for URL and File Filtering, User warnings, and Event Logging, and have already started extending it to add even more capabilities. 

Customers will get several benefits from RMIF:

• Maximized Microsoft investments. This framework supports interoperability between an organization’s existing Microsoft infrastructure and Mattermost, ensuring continued productivity and convenience for all users.

• Enhanced security posture. Organizations can strengthen their security posture by enforcing strict separation of systems during security incidents and encouraging compliance with procedures.

• Targeted security controls. Organizations can more easily implement the specific controls and filters that are needed for their threat models and can adapt them over time as appropriate.  

• Improved user behaviors. The intuitive but subtle reminders by RMIF to users help cultivate a security-conscious culture within the organization, leading to better handling of sensitive information and reduced risk of accidental breaches.

We would love to hear your feedback on RMIF. If you’re a customer with a need or a partner looking to add your capabilities to Mattermost, please contact us today.