Greetings, everyone!
I'm Alex, the US-based intern working with the OpenSCAP team this summer. We also have an intern in Brno, Milan, who has been with the team for longer. I'm posting to highlight some of the work I've done, and how I think this will help the OpenSCAP community at large. I’ll be focusing on the SCAP Security Guide (SSG) project, where we host all of our compliance content. Part of the problems facing the OpenSCAP team is that we’re not experts with the complete matrix of different compliance documents, Linux distributions, or projects that we provide content for. As different individuals contribute to SSG, they usually do so for only the projects they’re familiar with. A direct result of this was that, over time, Debian, RHEL6, and RHEL7 content grew increasingly fragmented despite starting out largely similar. Partly, this was due to the complexity of writing content in XML format and using XSLT macros; with the migration to YAML markup and Jinja2 macros, maintaining a shared directory which supports all distributions is now easier than separate directories. On top of this, having many independent locations for content made it hard for individuals new to the project to find where to make their changes. Thus, merging the guides was an important step in reducing technical debt in SCAP Security Guide. Below, I outline one of the things we’ve improved this summer, with the hopes of encouraging more individuals to contribute to the SSG project. Hopefully a few users will be inspired to create quick PRs fixing issues you see on a day-to-day basis. Stay tuned for a later mailing list post about additional changes made. :) With the help of Martin Preisler, Gabe Alford, and everyone else, I've been collapsing the disparate Linux guides into a shared location: `linux_os/guide`. This helps to improve maintainability, finding the location of rules, and fixing any issues they have. Changes against one product will now benefit all products: typos, new additions, compliance with standardized language, etc. This means that, if anyone is carrying internal patches or tailoring files against rhel6, debian8, or wrlinux, your changes will not apply cleanly to the 0.1.40 release (or current master). While this causes major breakage--and you should audit your tailoring and patches--the quality of the content definitely improved on the whole. If you are able to upstream these, we'll be happy to review them and incorporate what we can, which will let us help migrate your rules in the future if we do any more reorganization. Together, these changes should significantly improve the contribution process and reduce the cost of maintaining the SSG project. To compare the latest master (cef60dd72fae0c858e236667344ba531188ba977) to the tagged v0.1.39 release (74e45ee0373d2c8f06dfc3fa66e6b83660cfce2a) to show the state of content: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 === v0.1.39 === * rules: 441 * checks (OVAL): 378 [85% covered] * fixes (bash): 280 [63% covered] * fixes (ansible): 221 [50% covered] * fixes (puppet): 32 [7% covered] * fixes (anaconda): 33 [7% covered] * CCEs: 423 [95% covered] === master === * rules: 480 * checks (OVAL): 391 [81% covered] * fixes (bash): 286 [59% covered] * fixes (ansible): 237 [49% covered] * fixes (puppet): 35 [7% covered] * fixes (anaconda): 35 [7% covered] * CCEs: 406 [84% covered] Benchmark statistics for debian8: === v0.1.39 === Profile all: * rules: 49 * checks (OVAL): 45 [91% covered] * fixes (bash): 9 [18% covered] * fixes (ansible): 23 [46% covered] * fixes (puppet): 9 [18% covered] * fixes (anaconda): 0 [0% covered] * CCEs: 16 [32% covered] === master === Profile all: * rules: 213 * checks (OVAL): 88 [41% covered] * fixes (bash): 22 [10% covered] * fixes (ansible): 34 [15% covered] * fixes (puppet): 12 [5% covered] * fixes (anaconda): 0 [0% covered] * CCEs: 0 [0% covered] Benchmark statistics for wrlinux: === v0.1.39 === Profile all: * rules: 50 * checks (OVAL): 29 [57% covered] * fixes (bash): 13 [26% covered] * fixes (ansible): 10 [20% covered] * fixes (puppet): 0 [0% covered] * fixes (anaconda): 0 [0% covered] * CCEs: 0 [0% covered] === master === Profile all: * rules: 213 * checks (OVAL): 55 [25% covered] * fixes (bash): 15 [7% covered] * fixes (ansible): 10 [4% covered] * fixes (puppet): 2 [0% covered] * fixes (anaconda): 0 [0% covered] * CCEs: 0 [0% covered] Note that many of the rules which were added to Debian 8 and WRLinux lack checks and remediations. Most of these do have corresponding checks for RHEL7 though -- if you’re interested in contributing PRs to add support for these distributions, we’re happy to review and merge them! If anyone wants help getting started, feel free to ask. For more technical information about these changes, please refer to the corresponding pull requests below, or reach out to one of us, either directly or via the mailing list. (Friendly reminder that we lurk in the #openscap channel on Freenode. Due to spam recently, we've restricted messaging to users with voice mode, but we're happy to grant that to anyone if they PM one of the operators). - rhel6 start: https://github.com/OpenSCAP/scap-security-guide/pull/3037 - debian8 start: https://github.com/OpenSCAP/scap-security-guide/pull/3129 - wrlinux start: https://github.com/OpenSCAP/scap-security-guide/pull/3153 - rhel6 end: https://github.com/OpenSCAP/scap-security-guide/pull/3131 - debian8 end: https://github.com/OpenSCAP/scap-security-guide/pull/3151 - wrlinux end: https://github.com/OpenSCAP/scap-security-guide/pull/3154 Thanks everyone for their support, advice, and reviews! As always, we're happy to receive feedback, issues regarding the content, or PRs helping to improve the content. We'll do our best to review these in a timely manner and will try and tag some issues as easy fix or help wanted if people are looking for a place to get started. And lastly, a shout-out and thanks to all our external contributors! Until next time, Alex Scheel Freenode: cipherboy in #openscap GitHub: https://github.com/cipherboy _______________________________________________ Open-scap-list mailing list Open-scap-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/open-scap-list
