Remediation Subjects
A remediation subject is a canonical definition of something that can be remediated — a piece of software, a service, or a configuration. Think of it as the abstract “what” that needs fixing, independent of any specific device. Chrome is a subject. Chrome 119 on Jake’s laptop is a remediation target.
How subjects are matched
Section titled “How subjects are matched”Subjects are the organizing unit of Furl’s remediation system. When scanner data flows in, Furl matches each finding to a subject using a multi-step pipeline:
Scanner data → CPE match → Exact name match → Alias match → Normalized match → SubjectThis means the same software reported with different names by different scanners (e.g., Google Chrome from one tool, chrome from another) ends up correlated to one subject.
Subject types
Section titled “Subject types”| Type | Examples | Typical fix |
|---|---|---|
| Software | Chrome, Log4j, Python | Update, patch, uninstall |
| Service | SMBv1, SSH, Windows Defender | Enable, disable, configure |
| Configuration | Registry keys, TLS settings, firewall rules | Modify value, apply policy |
Why subjects matter
Section titled “Why subjects matter”Subjects are what remediation strategies are defined against. A strategy says “here’s how to update Chrome” — it’s attached to the Chrome subject, not to a specific CVE. This means one strategy can resolve many findings across many endpoints.
Package identifiers
Section titled “Package identifiers”Each subject can have package identifiers that map it to package manager names. For example, the “Google Chrome” subject might map to google-chrome-stable (apt), GoogleChrome (Chocolatey), and com.google.Chrome (Homebrew Cask). These identifiers power automated remediation by giving strategies a concrete handle to act on.
Related
Section titled “Related”- Findings — findings are grouped by subject
- Remediation Strategies — strategies are defined per subject
- Remediation Targets — concrete instances of a subject on an endpoint