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Red Hat Continues to Drive Open Security Standards; OpenSCAP Receives NIST Certification

Community project certified under the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Security Content Automation Protocol 1.2

RALEIGH, N.C. - —

RALEIGH, N.C. – April 29, 2014 – Red Hat Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that OpenSCAP 1.0.8 has been certified by the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST) Security Content Automation Protocol (SCAP) 1.2 in the Authenticated Configuration Scanner category with the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposure (CVE) option. The new certification adds Red Hat to a short list of vendors qualified for the large, complex SCAP standard, making OpenSCAP and Red Hat driving forces in the security space.

A synthesis of interoperable specifications based on in-depth community collaboration, SCAP provides an overarching security checklist that all security vendors supporting the standard can utilize. The standard defines common operations for security scanners, providing for security content that can be written once and run correctly on another certified scanner, allowing repeatable security assessments to be done quickly and continuously for policy compliance. Created more than five years ago, OpenSCAP is Red Hat’s open source community project to address these standards.

Delivered as part of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform, OpenSCAP provides a library that can parse and evaluate each component of the SCAP standard. The library approach allows for the swift creation of new SCAP tools rather than spending extensive time learning existing file structure and content. OpenSCAP offers a multi-purpose tool designed to format content into documents or scan the system based on this content. DISA STIG, NIST's USGCB, and Red Hat's Security Response Team's content (as well as anything authored to SCAP standards) are all supported by OpenSCAP, and the project has also been integrated with Red Hat Satellite and a content tailoring program called scap-workbench.

Supporting Quotes
Gunnar Hellekson, chief strategist, U.S. Public Sector, Red Hat
“SCAP is a valuable tool for maintaining a secure, consistent computing environment, and it would be a shame if you could only take advantage of this open standard with expensive, proprietary tools.” We believe in open standards, and we believe in the continuous, repeatable security process SCAP makes possible. That's why we're proud to offer this certified, open source SCAP tool. OpenSCAP will make it much easier for agencies to add verifiable, repeatable scanning to their security process.”

Stephan Mueller, atsec, Team Lead
“Red Hat's development team did a great job implementing the sizable and challenging requirements from the SCAP standard for 32 bit and 64 bit Linux systems.”

Additional Resources

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