Hello Trey,

the change that is discussed here is a backwards-compatible one, so it wouldn't break anything for you.

I understand your pain, but as the repository increases in size both in rule count and profile count, actions need to be taken so the project retains its level of maintainability. For example, the recent redesign of templates was quite disruptive, but it also fixed tens of rules that nobody had capacity to fix before.

This change aims to introduce possibility to reuse chunks of rules between profiles, and to make profile definitions easier to read and to maintain.

How would you rate maintainability of https://github.com/ComplianceAsCode/content/blob/master/rhel7/profiles/ncp.profile and of https://github.com/ComplianceAsCode/content/blob/master/rhel8/profiles/ospp.profile ? Both profiles select over hundred of rules, and I am sure that the RHEL7 profile would make it very difficult for anybody to determine whether a rule is missing, or the profile is complete. The RHEL8 profile has comments that make things more clear, and the proposal we are discussing in this thread basically moves things one step further, from optional comments to a schema. It will still be possible to do things the old way though.

I am sure that all contributors feel disappointed when contributions are not accepted, and trust me, it happens to everybody. I would recommend you to have a fork with all rules that were rejected upstream added.

You say that the immediate focus should be content completeness and accuracy. I think that this should be the long-term focus. When you have incorrect copy-pasted code, the immediate thing to do is not fixing it again by more copy-pasting, but one should rather remove the copy-pasting, if it is possible. Unfortunately, this is what breaks the backwards compatibility, but it is always for a good reason.

If you have a particular backward-compatibility problem, please tell us, and we may write a blog post about it, so porting your old code will be fast and efficient: https://complianceascode.github.io

Best regards,
Matej Tyc

On 05. 06. 20 20:25, Trey Henefield wrote:


This won't solve the problems with your content.

The problem is that there has been pushback to accept community suggestions due to personal perferences. There is much more focus on continuously changing the structure of the project, than the content of the project.

The ultimate goal for this project should be to provide checks and remediations that accurately reflect (no more and no less) what is required by a particular regulation.

Regaurdless of what default behaviors are present in the RedHat operating system, if a configuration is required to be explicitly configured, it should be configured. So that the intent of what the requirement is explicitly requiring is addressed. Saying that this does not apply because it does this already, does not hold well when this content is used and this discrepency has to be explained to validators.

Our organization has basically gave up contributing and maintain our own personal branch to ensure we provide solutions that meet the needed requirements.

To greatly improve this project, the immediate focus needs to be on content completeness and accuracy. This would provide the best value this project could offer to the community.

The structure of this project and how to better improve it should be a secondary focus, with these structural changes better thought out and implemented, before being integrated into the project. These major changes should be introduced less frequently (1 or 2 times a year) to allow contributors time to complete their changes. Just about every two months when a new release is pushed, we have to redo allot of stuff we did to get our changes working in the new release. This is very time consuming and difficult to maintain.

I truly hope someone there at RedHat is finally listening to this and takes our advice.

Best regards,


Trey Henefield, CISSP
Cyber Security Manager
Ultra Intelligence & Communications
4101 Smith School Road
Building IV, Suite 100
Austin, TX 78744 USA
T: +1 512 327 6795 ext. 647
M: +1 512 541 6450
ultra.group

-----Original Message-----
From: Jan Cerny <jcerny@redhat.com>
Sent: Friday, June 5, 2020 9:36 AM
To: SCAP Security Guide <scap-security-guide@lists.fedorahosted.org>
Subject: Policy source data format proposal is ready for comments

Hi,

The policy source data format proposal is available and ready for comments. The text has been submitted as a pull request on GitHub to make the discussion easier using comments and reviews.
See https://github.com/ComplianceAsCode/content/pull/5817
We are looking forward to seeing your feedback on GitHub.

What is it about? We will use the policy source data format to improve development of our profiles. It will allow us to store security controls and requirements in the repository and then define profiles by using their IDs instead of separate rules.

This is done in order to solve the problem that there is no easy way to demonstrate to profile stakeholders the status of their profile.

Intended workflow:

* SME identifies security controls the policy consists of. Those controls serve as direct input for our profiles.
* SME goes through controls, and makes sure that they are sufficiently covered by rules.
* SME fine-tunes the profile by overriding a couple of individual rules in the profile file.

Once the format is accepted we can start developing tools that support this new workflow.

In future, we can also use it for further refactoring, for example streamlining the generation of HTML tables.

Best regards

--
Jan Černý
Security Technologies | Red Hat, Inc.
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