Hi Jan,
Thanks for taking the time to respond.
But the issue is right now there isn't motivation to do that. Let me
explain -
the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 CVE OVAL changes pretty quickly (to my
knowledge
it's updated every 12 hours). So instructing oscap / scap-workbench tools
to
use cached XML file from some chosen location would be prone to "false
sense
of security" (suppose 2 weeks outdated "Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux_6.xml"
file
that would be used to scan the system in question rather than more recent
one -
this could result in state the system wouldn't be reported as vulnerable to
pretty lot of CVE issues).
The motivation in our case is to have regular scans of machines on an air
gapped network using up-to-date (within som reasonable time frame) scanning
content. Given that the machines will be offline from the internet there
is an acceptable limitation that tey can only be as up to date in packages
and scanning content as the frequency of the scheduled maintenance window.
Maybe we could consider enhancing the current implementation (to honour
remote OVAL timestamps / MD5 sums and use cached version if
possible).
But this:
* First needs scap-workbench RFE ticket,
* Itself is subject of upstream discussion, and can be closed as hard /
impossible to implement properly.
What might be easier is to allow the "save as RPM" option in the SCAP
Workbench for saving customizations to fetch any remote resources and
package them in the resulting RPM and have the resulting tailoring file
point to them with file:// instead. Thoughts?