On 12/4/13, 5:13 AM, Jan Lieskovsky wrote:
Hello Shawn,
just to known the current status of this one..
Are we waiting for wider feedback from other participants of this mailing list for their opinion prior going ahead implementing this?
Or should I first look what would need to be changed (and come with a proposal how to fix) wrt to RPM packages building from new scheme prior actually starting using your proposal?
Many of us are just getting back online after the US holidays, so apologies for the delay. I did want to give others a chance to chime in though.
A few comments in-line below.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Jan Lieskovsky" jlieskov@redhat.com To: scap-security-guide@lists.fedorahosted.org Sent: Tuesday, December 3, 2013 10:59:58 AM Subject: Re: [PATCH] [RFC] Creating shared bash script directory
----- Original Message -----
From: "Shawn Wells" shawn@redhat.com To: scap-security-guide@lists.fedorahosted.org Sent: Tuesday, December 3, 2013 5:56:48 AM Subject: Re: [PATCH] [RFC] Creating shared bash script directory
On 12/2/13, 7:42 AM, Jan Lieskovsky wrote:
----- Original Message -----
From 3ad8ce28808123fb2d66db09afb98a3b7fd105b4 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Shawn Wells <shawn at redhat.com> > Date: Fri, 29 Nov 2013 23:48:16 -0500 > Subject: [PATCH] [RFC] Creating shared bash script directory
As remediation content expands, many scripts will be repurposed across operating system releases. To reduce > the maintanence burden of having the same script in multiple places, I propose to create a shared fix directory. A patch to demonstrate this concept is attached.
This is a great idea.
combinefixes was modified to first look at input/fixes/bash, then .. / shared/fixes / , else echo a "no fix exists" message.
The downside to this approach is "exclusion" -- just because a script does not exist within RHEL6/fixes/bash does not > automatically mean we want the .. / shared/fixes / version. Unsure how to handle this. One idea was to 'touch RHEL6/fixes/bash', > and then delete that file if the shared version was to be inherited.
How about to keep the shared fixes scripts as proposed, but have combinefixes unmodified? IOW when the fix should be included, we would create just symlink from the shared directory to particular product fixes directory (no symlink => fix isn't included). And add some README file in the shared directory documenting this practice (IOW when adding new fixes the contributor to consider if the fix is universal enough and could be re-used also in other product).
That's completely common sensical.
What are your thoughts on doing this for OVAL as well? We'd need to update the platform tags, however that's much simpler than retaining multiple copies of the core OVAL.
Was thinking about OVAL checks too - I think it would make sense to share OVAL checks as much as possible also. Two cases can happen (I can quickly think of):
- just platform would differ - we could handle this via XSLT transformation
during the Makefile stage for product (IOW the shared version would have some placeholder, evaluated during build of the content to one of RHEL6 / Fedora 19 etc.),
I really like your idea of XSLT. To expand upon this, perhaps we could write logic into the XSLT that would verify the OVAL has received test_attestation for the associated platform.
For example:
<definition class="compliance" id="umask_for_daemons" version="1"> <metadata> <title>Set Daemon umask</title> <affected family="unix"> <platform>Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6</platform> </affected> <description>The daemon umask should be set as appropriate</description> <reference source="swells" ref_id="20130901" ref_url="test_attestation" /> </metadata> <criteria> <criterion test_ref="test_umask_for_daemons" /> </criteria> </definition>
I propose we extend the <reference> tag, to something similar to: <reference source="swells" ref_id="20130901" ref_url="test_attestation" platform="RHEL6" />
The XSLT would check for test_attestation against platform=RHEL6, and if so, continue the build. If the Make was running against Fedora, the build would fail with an error similar to "Error: No test_attestation for umask_for_daemons against Fedora 19"
We'd probably want some developer level flag to override this though, for non-RPM builds that the development community runs on their local systems.
- whole OVAL check would differ (examples SysV Init vs systemd) - in this
case each of the products would have its own OVAL implementation at appropriate place.
Yes, precisely!
I think this proposal is elastic enough to allow us to have shared definitions on one side (symlinks to shared code case), and also deal with particularities of a specific product (instead of symlink it would have the OVAL definition / remediation script implementation on expected place for that product).
To get this working we would need yet slightly to modify the way how RPMs are created for both of RHEL / Fedora (include the shared directory etc.), but (I think) the advantages / simplification this concept brings are worthy the effort.
Thank you && Regards, Jan.
Jan iankko Lieskovsky / Red Hat Security Technologies Team