SCAP Workbench User Manual

Even before we start the workbench we need to find content to open. Probably the best choice right now is scap-security-guide ^[3].

It is possible that scap-security-guide has already been installed on your system as a dependency of scap-workbench. If it isn’t, install it:

After installation a new application entry for SCAP Workbench should appear in your desktop environments application menu.

In case you cannot find any SCAP Workbench application icon / entry to click, press Alt+F2 to bring up the run command dialog (works in Gnome 3 and KDE 4), type 'scap-workbench' and confirm.

SCAP Workbench should start and if you installed scap-security-guide from your package repository, workbench will immediately open a dialog letting you choose which SSG variant you want to open.

For the remainder of this guide let us assume that you chose Fedora. All the instructions are similar on other variants.

Selecting Other SCAP content in the SSG integration dialog or choosing the Open Other content action from the File menu (top of the main window) will enable you to change opened content. Keep in mind that workbench only supports opening XCCDF, Source DataStream, SCAP RPM files or their bzip2 variants. Everything else will result in an error dialog being shown.

If your content provider ships both XCCDF and Source DataStream files you are better off using Source DataStream. Especially if you want to perform remote scans where workbench only supports datastreams so far.

SCAP RPM will usually contain a tailoring file, as well as input file in the form of XCCDF or Source DataStream.

To prevent workbench from opening default content when it starts you can either uninstall the content or pass a different path via command line.

See alternative contents for more content choices.

In case you have prepared or were given a tailoring file for your specific evaluation use-case, you can load by clicking on the Customization combobox and selecting the Select customization file…​ option. This will bring up a file open dialog where you can select your customization file (XCCDF tailoring file).

All SCAP content has at least one profile - the (default) profile which is an empty profile that does not change selection of any rules and does not affect values passed to any of the checks. Only rules with the selection attribute equal to "true" and all their ancestor xccdf:Group selection attribute also being "true" are evaluated in a (default) profile.

It depends on the content, but the (default) profile is unlikely to be the choice you want. SCAP Workbench will only choose it implicitly if there are no other profiles. The first profile that is not the (default) profile will be chosen.

Use the Profile combobox to change which profile will be used for subsequent evaluation. When SCAP Workbench is not evaluating, it previews selected rules of the current profile. This list will refresh every time you customize a profile or select a different one.

After you have selected the profile suitable for your desired evaluation, you still may want to make slight alterations to it. Most commonly, it would be unselecting that one undesirable rule that makes no sense on this particular machine.

Make sure your desired profile is selected and click Customize.

In case the Customize action will create a new profile you will be presented with a dialog that lets you choose an ID for that new profile. Choose the ID wisely, you may need it later.

A new modal window will be shown, you cannot interact with the rest of the application until you either confirm or discard your customization changes.

In the example case, we do not care about minimum and maximum age for passwords and do not want the rules failing for our configuration. Let us expand the tree until we find the offending rules and unselect them both.

You can also change variables that will later be used for evaluation. See the following example, where we set minimum password length to 14.

Changes to the values are applied immediately as you change the combobox or editbox.

After desired customization changes are done, click OK to get back to the previous GUI. To undo all of the changes to the profile, click Cancel. If you want to delete the profile from tailoring, click Delete profile.

All of these options will close the customization window.

To create a new Profile from scratch select the (default) profile and click Customize. Profiles created this way will not inherit any other profiles and will instead be "standalone".

Keep in mind that this won’t enable you to create new XCCDF rules or OVAL checks. The new profile can only contain checks already in the benchmark.

SCAP Workbench will scan local machine by default. However, you can also scan remote machines using SSH.

To scan a remote machine, select Remote Machine (over SSH) in the Target combobox. A pair of input boxes will appear. Input the desired username and hostname and select the port. Username and hostname should be put into the first editbox in the format commonly accepted by ssh - username@hostname. Make sure the machine is reachable, the selected user can log in over SSH, and has sufficient privileges to evaluate the machine.

The Remediate checkbox will do remediation as part of the evaluation itself. After evaluation is done, oscap will go over failed rules and attempt to remediate each of them.

The rules that were remediated will show up as fixed in the rule result list.

After you select a profile, you can export a remediation role to a file. Bash scripts, Ansible playbooks and Puppet manifests are the formats supported. The output file will contain all remediations for rules selected by the profile that are available. As the content of the remediation role solely depends on the profile, it is referred to as profile-based remediation role.

The possibility to save remediations to a file puts you in charge - you can examine it, edit it and decide what remediations to apply. However, the result-based remediations export produces output that fits your system better. See [view-and-analyze-results] to learn more about it.

Be aware that remediations may not be implemented in all formats. The most widely supported formats are bash scripts and Ansible playbooks.

Everything is set up we can now start the evaluation. Click the Scan button to proceed. If you selected a remote machine target, SSH may ask you for a password at this point.

If you selected to scan the local machine, workbench will show a dialog that allows you to authenticate and scan the machine with superuser rights. You can click Cancel if you wish to scan using your current permissions.

The application now starts the oscap tool and waits for it to finish, reporting partial results along the way in the rule result list. Keep in mind that the tool cannot guess how long processing of any particular rule will take. Only the number of rules that have been processed and the number that remain are used to estimate progress. Please be patient and wait for oscap to finish evaluation.

After you press the Scan button, all the previous options will be disabled and greyed-out. You cannot change them until you press the Clear button which will clear all results.

After evaluation finishes, you should see three new buttons: Clear, Save Results, Generate remediation role and Show Report.

Pressing Show Report will open the HTML report of the evaluation in your internet browser.

Your evaluation results can be saved in several formats:

If you are unsure which format to choose for archiving results, XCCDF Result is commonly supported and HTML reports can be generated from it with the oscap tool.

Opening the Generate remediation role pop-up menu will let you to save result-based remediations to a file. The output file will contain all available remediations for rules that have failed the scan, so it should fit your needs better than profile-based remediations. As the saved content is based on actual scan results, it is referred to as results-based remediation role.

If you scan with a customized profile, you may encounter an error - see [known-issues] for a workaround.

Saving remediation roles to the disk may not work for a customized profile. Specifically, it won’t work if you add additional rules to it. If this limitation affects you, follow these steps:

Remark: You will need to use the oscap command-line utility, which is bundled together with scap-workbench.