Hi Tim,

This is a completely unofficial (and quite possibly non-helpful) response as I am primarily a user of OpenSCAP, not a developer nor do I work for NIST or any government agency for that matter.

But I run Arch locally on my desktop as do most of my infrastructure team members so this caught my eye. And I run OpenSCAP scans on RHEL/7.3 instances that we support.

The STIG for RHEL/7 has just recently been NIST certified which means stamped with their approval for use on government systems. There is no (certified) STIG for Debian, Arch, Ubuntu, etc.

In my opinion, this reflects a larger issue - a peeve of mine: While the government (in particular, the DHS which is driving the Continuous Diagnostics and Monitoring (CDM) process) is beginning to realize that static stamps of security (in particular, the FISMA/ATO which runs on a three-year cycle) no longer matches the fluid security threat landscape, they are not willing to embrace the major paradigm shift of rolling releases as found in Arch. The hesitancy is based in good intentions: if you exhaustively examine a system for security threats and stamp it SECURE then any changes to it could introduce new bugs/security holes.

But of course, new bugs/security holes are constantly being discovered in Windows 7, etc. Meanwhile, as new threat vectors are discovered, new system architectures evolve to remediate or completely disallow/disable the new threat, and these are available in new releases. If a bug is found, it is immediately patched. (I love Arch.)

The STIGs still serve a good purpose, as they enable system specific scanning of a large number of controls - I believe it has helped me ensure greater security of my RHEL/7 systems. But the snails pace of NIST certification and the inability to consider other operating systems and applications seems to be based in the goal of static security management.

Well, that was quite a ramble, but I will stop before I go on. You might also want to check out work that 18F did on securing Ubuntu 14.04 a couple years ago, see: https://github.com/fisma-ready/ubuntu-lts

And I am working toward proposing some initial steps toward greater flexibility, but they are not ready for publication yet. I'll drop a note here when they are.

 Good luck with your Arch system. (And maybe someone else may have something more helpful to contribute.)
=Fen


On Mon, Apr 17, 2017 at 1:42 PM, <bradt@signatureresearchinc.com> wrote:
Hello,

My name is Tim Bradt. I am software developer at Signature Research, Inc. I have been charged with getting SCAP up and running on some of our systems.

We are running Arch Linux. I was wondering what the process would be for porting the RHEL7 guide to Arch as we need the DISA STIG for system approval.

Thanks for your help,
Tim
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