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 – It provides interface to SCAP document processing and evaluation. Library is written in C and it provides bindings for python and perl.
- SCAP Scanner – It utilize the library and provides local scanning capabilities
- XSLT Transformations – The project provides tranformations that allow user to transform various SCAP content from XML to more human-readable HTMl form.
- SCAP Content – We also provide example SCAP content that can be used mainly for experimental testing purposes.
OpenSCAP supports following OVAL tests:
| Unix schema | Linux schema | Independent schema |
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Furthermore, OpenSCAP also implements technology that is not included in SCAP standards – the alternative check engine SCE. Allows you to use familiar scripting language of your choice instead of OVAL for checks.
Current Release: 0.9.5 (Mar 19, 2013)
- oscap xccdf remediate (new oscap module which introduces offline remediation; the remediation based on existing xccdf:TestResult file)
- added support for SCE into DataStream (SCE scripts can now be embedded into the DataStream file similarly as OVAL can)
- improved bash completion and documentation
- bug fixes
