Introduction

Benchmarks provide security recommendations for your computers, utilising the OpenSCAP tools and policies.

From the OpenSCAP homepage: In the ever-changing world of computer security where new vulnerabilities are being discovered and patched every day, enforcing security compliance must be a continuous process. It also needs to include a way to make adjustments to policies, as well as periodic assessment and risk monitoring. The OpenSCAP ecosystem provides tools and customizable policies for a quick, cost-effective and flexible implementation of these processes.

The OpenSCAP ecosystem provides multiple tools to assist administrators and auditors with assessment, measurement, and enforcement of security baselines including a wide variety of hardening guides and configuration baselines developed by the open source community, ensuring that you can choose a security policy which best suits the needs of your organization, regardless of its size.

Security Content Automation Protocol (SCAP) is U.S. standard maintained by National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The OpenSCAP project is a collection of open source tools for implementing and enforcing this standard, and has been awarded the SCAP 1.2 certification by NIST in 2014.

How Does it Work?

Benchmarks are created by providing an operating system and Version, combined with a specific guide and a list of machines to execute it upon. After creation, benchmarks are executed against the list of machines on a schedule.

Benchmark execution and processing can take a lengthy amount of time, hence the preference to schedule them and not run them ad-hoc.