Detection Engineering
How OPFORGE approaches detection validation
Detection engineering in OPFORGE is not treated as a checklist exercise.
The goal is not simply to produce alerts. The goal is to determine whether a defensive system generates timely, interpretable, and operationally useful signal when realistic behavior occurs.
Core Questions
Every validation effort should answer:
- Was the behavior observable?
- Did telemetry arrive in usable form?
- Did the detection fire?
- Did it fire at the right point in the chain?
- Was the result useful to a defender?
- What should be changed?
Validation Workflow
- choose a behavior
- define expected telemetry
- map candidate detections
- execute and observe
- judge usefulness
- refine and rerun
OPFORGE prioritizes detections that are behaviorally grounded, tied to meaningful telemetry, repeatably testable, and useful for analyst decision-making.