Standardized Security - OpenSCAP

The OpenSCAP Project was created to provide an open-source framework to the community which enables integration with the Security Content Automation Protocol (SCAP) suite of standards and capabilities. It is the goal of OpenSCAP to provide a simple, easy to use set of interfaces to serve as the framework for community use of SCAP.

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 to improve the accessibility of SCAP and enhance the usability of the information it represents. Tools for parsing SCAP documents and querying content must be created to achieve this. This requires common set of interfaces to be defined and implemented to meet this need. It is the intent of this project to provide these interfaces and functional examples that would allow others in the open-source and vendor communities to make use of SCAP while minimizing the effort needed to gain value from it.

Standardized Security: OpenSCAP:

ºLibrary – OpenSCAP library provides API to SCAP document processing.
ºToolkit – oscap is a command line tool that provides various SCAP capabilities; for instance: configuration scanner, vulnerability scanner, SCAP content validation and transformation etc.
ºData – We also produce SCAP content samples that can be used mainly for experimental testing purposes.


Specifications supported by OpenSCAP:

ºXCCDF: The Extensible Configuration Checklist Description Format (ver. 1.2)
ºOVAL®: Open Vulnerability and Assessment Language (ver. 5.10.1)
ºAsset Identification (ver. 1.1)
ºARF: Asset Reporting Format (ver. 1.1)
ºCCE™: Common Configuration Enumeration (ver. 5.0)
ºCPE™: Common Platform Enumeration (ver. 2.3)
ºCVE®: Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures
ºCVSS: Common Vulnerability Scoring System (ver. 2.0)
ºStandardized Security: OpenSCAP Standardized Security

Furthermore, OpenSCAP also implements technology that is not included in SCAP standards:


ºSCE – the alternative check engine. Allows you to use familiar scripting language of your choice instead of OVAL for checks.


Related Projects

ºscap-workbench – a tool with nice graphical user interface that provides scanning(both local and remote machine), content customization and machine remediation functionality.

ºSCAP addon for Anaconda installer, which is used in Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, for applying SCAP content in the installation process.

ºSCE Community Content – set of various security configuration settings (security controls) expressed in standardized format. Each security control can be evaluated by a small shell script which is executed via SCE.

ºSCC – a compiler used for SC. SC is a small language intended to make the creation of OVAL content easier. The SC language is more “human readable” than the XML of OVAL.

ºsecstate – a tool that attempts to streamline the Certification and Accreditation (C&A) process of Linux systems by providing a mechanism to verify, validate, and provideremediation to security relevant configuration items.


Security Compliance Communities

ºSCAP Security Guide
ºAqueduct

Download OpenSCAP