OpenSCAP project¶

Overview¶

SCAP is a line of standards managed by NIST. It was created to provide a standardized approach to maintaining the security of enterprise systems, such as automatically verifying the presence of patches, checking system security configuration settings, and examining systems for signs of compromise.

The SCAP suite contains multiple complex data exchange formats that are to be used to transmit important vulnerability, configuration, and other security data. Historically, there have been few tools that provide a way to query this data in the needed format. This lack of tools makes the barrier to entry very high and discourages adoption of these protocols by the community. It's our goal to create a framework of libraries and tools to improve the accessibility of SCAP and enhance the usability of the information it represents.

OpenSCAP components:

Library - OpenSCAP library provides API to SCAP document processing.
Toolkit - oscap is a command line tool that provides various SCAP capabilities; for instance: configuration scanner, vulnerability scanner, SCAP content validation and transformation etc.
Specifications supported by OpenSCAP:

• XCCDF: The Extensible Configuration Checklist Description Format (ver. 1.2)
• OVAL®: Open Vulnerability and Assessment Language (ver. 5.10.1)
• Asset Identification (ver. 1.1)
• ARF: Asset Reporting Format (ver. 1.1)
• CCE™: Common Configuration Enumeration (ver. 5.0)
• CPE™: Common Platform Enumeration (ver. 2.3)
• CVE®: Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures
• CVSS: Common Vulnerability Scoring System (ver. 2.0)

OpenSCAP and Foreman¶

foreman_openscap enables automated vulnerability assessment and compliance audit of Foreman based infrastructure.

• Centralized policy management.
• Centralized audit reports.
• Easy setup of policy per host or hostgroup.
• Schedule when audits should run.