Simplicity is a form of art...

Doing a content check with OVAL

Let's create an OVAL check to see if /etc/inittab's single user definitions only refer to /sbin/sulogin or /sbin/rc single. First, the skeleton:

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The first thing we notice is that there are several namespaces defined within OVAL. These namespaces refer to …

What is OVAL?

Time to discuss OVAL (Open Vulnerability Assessment Language). In all the previous posts I focused the checking of rules (does the system comply with the given rule) on scripts, through the Script Check Engine supported by openscap. The advantage of SCE is that most people can quickly provide automated checks …

Remediation through SCAP

I promised in my previous post to give some information about remediation.

Remediation is the process where you fix a system to become compliant again after finding out there is a violation on the system. The easiest form of remediation of course is to just notify the administrator and give …

Running a bit with the XCCDF document

In my previous post I introduced automated checking of rules through SCE (Script Check Engine). Let's focus a bit more now on running with an XCCDF document: how to automatically check the system, read the results and find more information of those results.

To provide a usable example, you can …

XCCDF - Documenting a bit more than just descriptions

In my previous post I made a skeleton XCCDF document. By now, we can create a well documented "baseline" (best practice) for our subject (say PostgreSQL). But for now I only talked about <description> whereas XCCDF allows many other tags as well.

You can add metadata information for a particular …