http://www.gcn.com/online/vol1_no1/45735-1.html
By Joab Jackson
GCN
01/25/08
On Feb. 1 the National Institute of Standards and Technology will
release a list of validated scanners that check for Federal Desktop Core
Configuration compliance. The scanners all use the Security Content
Automation Protocol (SCAP) to automatically scan desktop computers and
return the results, said Peter Mell, NISTs SCAP validation program
manager, at an FDCC workshop held yesterday in Gaithersburg, Md.
Last July, the Office of Management and Budget issued a clarification
memo stating that agencies must monitor their desktop computers with
SCAP tools "as they become available."
The scanners will ensure that the computers' configurations stay within
the guidelines set by the FDDC, a group of OMB-mandated
security-sensitive configuration settings developed by the NIST and the
National Security Agency.
On Feb. 1, agencies will have to submit to OMB a report of all the
desktop computers running the Microsoft Windows XP and Windows Vista
operating systems, as well as the number of those that are
FDCC-compliant, according to OMB FDCC lead Wendy Liberante, who gave an
impromptu clarificationat the event. On March 31, agencies must submit a
report to NIST of the status of the Windows desktop computers
As of January, however, no SCAP products have been validated by NIST,
which just set up the validation program last summer.
SCAP is a framework "for automating and standardizing vulnerability
management measurement and policy compliance," Mell said. It predates
FDCC and can be used for checking computers to see if they meet other
mandates, such as the Federal Information Security Management Act.
Although the SCAP validation process ranges across 12 different
functions, this upcoming set of validated tools will be scanners, Mell
noted. He did not speculate how many products would be validated, though
the final testing is being done on about five.
"NIST is not recommending these products. We are not mandating these
products. What we are doing is validating that the products correctly
implement SCAP," Mell said. The validation will look at whether all the
settings on the FDDC are checked, as well as if they are checked in the
procedure that Microsoft and the government recommends.
"We have encoded in SCAP not just what to check for, but exactly way the
tool should go about checking those things," Mell said.
The only items SCAP won't be able to check are the number of FDCC items
that must be checked manually. Two such checks exist for Windows XP and
15 exist for Windows Vista. NIST is working with Microsoft to find ways
to check these items without human intervention.
Despite the fact that no products have been validated, a few vendors
have released their own SCAP FDCC-based scanners, such as McAfee and
SignaCert. The SCAP validation, however, will ensure standardized
reporting and product interoperability.
"The beauty of SCAP is that you can throw away the tool you bought, buy
another SCAP-validated tool, put the same content into that, and be
assured that the content will process correctly in that new tool," Mell
said. "You're no longer locked-in to the same tool."
At the workshop, NSA technical director Paul Bartock talked about a
pilot program that a SCAP development team held last December at the
Maxwell-Gunter Air Force Base outside Montgomery Ala. The test involved
three products scanning a set number of machines, some deliberately
misconfigured.
In initial tests, "the tools reported about 90 percent of the same
information," Bartock said. The differences in results were then used to
make modifications to the SCAP protocol. "We knew the tools ingested the
SCAP data correctly and performed the checks," he said.
Received on Mon Jan 28 02:16:32 2008