Thank you sir.

I will start the merge process and hopefully I can get things merged and 
commited before the next release next month.

Best regards,


Trey Henefield, CISSP
Cyber Security Manager


[cid:image001.jpg@01D63FF6.A3F6E620]

Ultra Intelligence & Communications
4101 Smith School Road
Building IV, Suite 100
Austin, TX 78744 USA
T: +1 512 327 6795 ext. 647
M: +1 512 541 6450
ultra.group<http://www.ultra.group>

From: Matej Tyc <ma...@redhat.com>
Sent: Thursday, June 11, 2020 9:31 AM
To: scap-security-guide@lists.fedorahosted.org
Subject: Re: Policy source data format proposal is ready for comments


Hello Trey,

I have some good news for you - I am not aware of any compatibility issues 
between 0.1.48 and 0.1.50. In other words - no major changes for four months! 
Moreover, I can recall that some of those issues that you name have been fixed. 
It is difficult to say how those fixes interact with your, but I think that 
evaluating the upstream 0.1.50 will be mostly a pleasant experience.

I have hoped to learn more about actual build API breakages, but as you are on 
0.1.48, Jinja got quite stable, and there are already the new templates in 
place (introduced in 0.1.47). Interestingly, the example of templates show that 
incompatible changes don't always necessarily cause major issues. Right now, 
there are not any proposals aiming to introduce changes breaking the build API. 
We may see an increased usage of Jinja macros in checks and remediations, but 
that's all incremental.

As we are Red Hat employees, our prioritization in fixing issues is driven by 
opened Bugzillas, so if your organization has a subscription, it can influence 
the development in this way. We would like to leverage your effort on getting 
the STIG stuff right, so I hope that the "rebase" that you have to go through 
will be smooth, and we can start to work on your pull requests. My experience 
is that when the content gets close to regulations, the "political" aspect of 
the PR is much more difficult to deal with than the actual implementation. For 
that reason, I am happy that you are aware which requirements influence rules 
in question - that should streamline the discussion.

All the best,
Matej
On 10. 06. 20 14:58, Trey Henefield wrote:
Hi Matej,

So to put things in perspective, I am still on the 0.1.48 release. I just now 
got it to a point to where I have addressed as many requirements as my system 
will allow. I have roughly just under 400 checkins.

This is how far behind the baseline is. I am scared to even look at 0.1.50 as I 
will have to do this all over again with any new challenges that release brings 
me. Keeping in mind, this is just one small aspect of many other things I am 
involved with.

So to give some examples.

The implementation of jinja was interesting. I spent hours trying to figure out 
why some remediations and checks would not run even though the syntax looked 
correct. Only to discover that some files had the jinja syntax defined 
differently causing certain lines not being processed. It would have been nice 
if this code had been properly tested for correctness before being merged into 
the baseline.

The audit rules have consistent inaccuracies.

It seems like someone thought it was a good idea to replace every instance of 
‘auid!=4294967295’ with ‘auid!=unset’. While in theory, this may accomplish the 
same goal. But in practice, the STIG and its associated benchmark explicitly 
look for a specific value, which it no longer finds and is considered a 
finding. This results in allot of findings.

I also noticed that in support of the Suse Enterprise Linux STIG, all audit 
rules for privileged commands include ‘-perm x’, which creates a finding for 
the RHEL7 STIG because it looks for the rules to exist without defining the 
execution bit as a filter.

Java and Firefox are a bit outdated.

Jinja bash macro for firefox is pointing to the wrong file locations and has a 
syntax error.

SELinux syntax is incorrect for the remediations.

SSH ciphers and MACs OVAL check and remediation are wrong.

Screenlock keybinding OVAL check is incorrect.

RHEL6 was not included as a platform for account_umask_etc_profile.

set_password_hashing_algorithm_systemauth does not also check password-auth and 
also does not check for non-compliant values.

No password complexity checks/remediations exist.

The checks and remediations for disable_ctrlaltdel_reboot do not align with the 
RHEL6/7 STIGs.

Login banner text is not defined correctly.

The list goes on and on. I don’t have enough time to list everything. But 
luckily I have fixes for all of these things, among other things.

Does anyone on this project do any validation of the content against the 
requirements to ensure accurate implementation of the required configurations? 
Because if they did, they would see there is allot of work to get this content 
into a usable form.

I would highly advise someone there at Red Hat apply this content to a RHEL6 or 
RHEL7 system. Then run a scan using the latest official DISA benchmark. Then 
perform manual checks on the system using the latest version of the DISA STIG 
and the STG Viewer. You will then get an understanding of what I am seeing 
along with every other Red Hat customer using this content in an effort to try 
and be compliant.

Again, I would love to contribute my changes to help get this project back on 
track, but with the release of major changes to the structure and process every 
two months, its just impossible.

Best regards,


Trey Henefield, CISSP
Cyber Security Manager


Ultra Intelligence & Communications
4101 Smith School Road
Building IV, Suite 100
Austin, TX 78744 USA
T: +1 512 327 6795 ext. 647
M: +1 512 541 6450
ultra.group<http://www.ultra.group>

From: Matej Tyc <ma...@redhat.com><mailto:ma...@redhat.com>
Sent: Wednesday, June 10, 2020 4:50 AM
To: 
scap-security-guide@lists.fedorahosted.org<mailto:scap-security-guide@lists.fedorahosted.org>
Subject: Re: Policy source data format proposal is ready for comments


Hello Trey,

we are talking about two different things, and those are not mutually exclusive.

Some subjects see the projects as a gigantic jigsaw puzzle, where individual 
pieces are rules, and they can use those to compose custom profiles - I 
understood that this is your case as well. For those, everything else than 
rules and associated content doesn't really matter, and improvements to how 
rules are defined may become quite disruptive.

However, a huge number of subjects would like to use the high-level aspect of 
the project - profiles in datastreams that you can feed to the scanner right 
away, and that will scan your system. We get a huge number of requests for 
profiles, and we try to make things easier to profile authors, so they can 
start contributing to ComplianceAsCode, and we can focus on rules and on the 
testing infrastructure.

I disagree that we introduce new features just for the sake of creativity, and 
again, the announcement that started this discussion was about a 
backwards-compatible improvement that profile authors are on board with. In 
other words, this won't break anything, so you can relax about this.

I am really curious though what is it that broke your builds. Could you please 
share some details? We may be able to help, or to at least do a better job in 
this regard next time.

Best regards,
Matej
On 08. 06. 20 16:07, Trey Henefield wrote:
Hi Matej,

I see what you’re saying.

It does improve readability.

Ultimately, automation is king. I had some code in the project once upon a time 
that would improve visibility of coverage of the requirements. Pulling the data 
from the source requirements (i.e. STIG), then aligning that data with the STIG 
overlay to identify total coverage of the STIG, then aligning that data with 
the mapped OVAL rules to identify overall coverage of requirements by the 
checks and remediations included. This probably could have been extended to 
compare the rules in the STIG profile with the rules in the STIG overlay to 
identify rules in the overlay not captured in the profile and rules in the 
profile that don’t align to a requirement in the STIG overlay.

I still respectfully disagree with you.

The goal of this project is to provide content that facilitates helping 
organizations meet requirements. From the consumer side of this, this project 
is pretty pointless if it only gets you a fraction of the way there. To make 
this project useful, it needs to be more complete and accurate. Having it build 
better or include a better way showing what few requirements are addressed 
doesn’t provide any value add if it still doesn’t increase the percentage of 
coverage of requirements to be validated and mitigated.

You can change the frame of a picture, but it doesn’t change the picture.

I just want to give you the perspective from a user of this content. I can’t 
use the content as it’s provided. I have to go in and address all the issues 
and add code to get compliant for our systems. But for the many other users out 
there that don’t have the luxury of understanding how to deal with updating the 
code, they end up with a solution that gets them compliant after days\hours of 
manual changes to fix the issues it causes and make up for the lack of coverage 
where it doesn’t.

If the goal of this project is to be a pet project for developers to try new 
things and be creative, then I can understand your current direction.

If the goal of this project is to help users in meeting industry standards with 
applicable software instaled, then the direction should be to provide complete 
and accurate checks and remedations. This is what end users really need and 
would value most from this project.

Best regards,


Trey Henefield, CISSP
Cyber Security Manager



Ultra Intelligence & Communications
4101 Smith School Road
Building IV, Suite 100
Austin, TX 78744 USA
T: +1 512 327 6795 ext. 647
M: +1 512 541 6450
ultra.group<http://www.ultra.group>

From: Matej Tyc <ma...@redhat.com><mailto:ma...@redhat.com>
Sent: Monday, June 8, 2020 4:52 AM
To: 
scap-security-guide@lists.fedorahosted.org<mailto:scap-security-guide@lists.fedorahosted.org>
Subject: Re: Policy source data format proposal is ready for comments


Hello Trey,

the change that is discussed here is a backwards-compatible one, so it wouldn't 
break anything for you.

I understand your pain, but as the repository increases in size both in rule 
count and profile count, actions need to be taken so the project retains its 
level of maintainability. For example, the recent redesign of templates was 
quite disruptive, but it also fixed tens of rules that nobody had capacity to 
fix before.

This change aims to introduce possibility to reuse chunks of rules between 
profiles, and to make profile definitions easier to read and to maintain.

How would you rate maintainability of 
https://github.com/ComplianceAsCode/content/blob/master/rhel7/profiles/ncp.profile<https://github.com/ComplianceAsCode/content/blob/master/rhel7/profiles/ncp.profile>
 and of 
https://github.com/ComplianceAsCode/content/blob/master/rhel8/profiles/ospp.profile<https://github.com/ComplianceAsCode/content/blob/master/rhel8/profiles/ospp.profile>
 ? Both profiles select over hundred of rules, and I am sure that the RHEL7 
profile would make it very difficult for anybody to determine whether a rule is 
missing, or the profile is complete. The RHEL8 profile has comments that make 
things more clear, and the proposal we are discussing in this thread basically 
moves things one step further, from optional comments to a schema. It will 
still be possible to do things the old way though.

I am sure that all contributors feel disappointed when contributions are not 
accepted, and trust me, it happens to everybody. I would recommend you to have 
a fork with all rules that were rejected upstream added.

You say that the immediate focus should be content completeness and accuracy. I 
think that this should be the long-term focus. When you have incorrect 
copy-pasted code, the immediate thing to do is not fixing it again by more 
copy-pasting, but one should rather remove the copy-pasting, if it is possible. 
Unfortunately, this is what breaks the backwards compatibility, but it is 
always for a good reason.

If you have a particular backward-compatibility problem, please tell us, and we 
may write a blog post about it, so porting your old code will be fast and 
efficient: 
https://complianceascode.github.io<https://complianceascode.github.io>

Best regards,
Matej Tyc
On 05. 06. 20 20:25, Trey Henefield wrote:


This won't solve the problems with your content.

The problem is that there has been pushback to accept community suggestions due 
to personal perferences. There is much more focus on continuously changing the 
structure of the project, than the content of the project.

The ultimate goal for this project should be to provide checks and remediations 
that accurately reflect (no more and no less) what is required by a particular 
regulation.

Regaurdless of what default behaviors are present in the RedHat operating 
system, if a configuration is required to be explicitly configured, it should 
be configured. So that the intent of what the requirement is explicitly 
requiring is addressed. Saying that this does not apply because it does this 
already, does not hold well when this content is used and this discrepency has 
to be explained to validators.

Our organization has basically gave up contributing and maintain our own 
personal branch to ensure we provide solutions that meet the needed 
requirements.

To greatly improve this project, the immediate focus needs to be on content 
completeness and accuracy. This would provide the best value this project could 
offer to the community.

The structure of this project and how to better improve it should be a 
secondary focus, with these structural changes better thought out and 
implemented, before being integrated into the project. These major changes 
should be introduced less frequently (1 or 2 times a year) to allow 
contributors time to complete their changes. Just about every two months when a 
new release is pushed, we have to redo allot of stuff we did to get our changes 
working in the new release. This is very time consuming and difficult to 
maintain.

I truly hope someone there at RedHat is finally listening to this and takes our 
advice.

Best regards,


Trey Henefield, CISSP
Cyber Security Manager
Ultra Intelligence & Communications
4101 Smith School Road
Building IV, Suite 100
Austin, TX 78744 USA
T: +1 512 327 6795 ext. 647
M: +1 512 541 6450
ultra.group<http://ultra.group>

-----Original Message-----
From: Jan Cerny <jce...@redhat.com><mailto:jce...@redhat.com>
Sent: Friday, June 5, 2020 9:36 AM
To: SCAP Security Guide 
<scap-security-guide@lists.fedorahosted.org><mailto:scap-security-guide@lists.fedorahosted.org>
Subject: Policy source data format proposal is ready for comments

Hi,

The policy source data format proposal is available and ready for comments. The 
text has been submitted as a pull request on GitHub to make the discussion 
easier using comments and reviews.
See 
https://github.com/ComplianceAsCode/content/pull/5817<https://github.com/ComplianceAsCode/content/pull/5817>
We are looking forward to seeing your feedback on GitHub.

What is it about? We will use the policy source data format to improve 
development of our profiles. It will allow us to store security controls and 
requirements in the repository and then define profiles by using their IDs 
instead of separate rules.

This is done in order to solve the problem that there is no easy way to 
demonstrate to profile stakeholders the status of their profile.

Intended workflow:

* SME identifies security controls the policy consists of. Those controls serve 
as direct input for our profiles.
* SME goes through controls, and makes sure that they are sufficiently covered 
by rules.
* SME fine-tunes the profile by overriding a couple of individual rules in the 
profile file.

Once the format is accepted we can start developing tools that support this new 
workflow.

In future, we can also use it for further refactoring, for example streamlining 
the generation of HTML tables.

Best regards

--
Jan Černý
Security Technologies | Red Hat, Inc.
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