Hello,

On Monday, November 03, 2014 09:15:52 PM Kachigian, Christopher R wrote:
> Agreed that things need to be split out a bit more.  We check both when
> able because of various customer requirements.  We filled in the gaps with
> some home grown / COTS tools as part of our continuous monitoring program
> to check for ³both states² again depending on requirements.

Thanks for your insight. But since I stirred the pot, I probably should 
elaborate a bit more. Baselines really are about the configuration for next 
boot. What I noticed was that the recommended *manual* checks were different 
from what I know the SCAP scanner is looking at. Ideally, manual checks should 
produce the exact same results as the automated tools. Chances are they 
produce the same results, but in a particular case the format of a tool's 
output changed causing people grief that is unfortunate.

That said, I think there is room for the creation of content specifically 
looking for the fleeting / ephemeral values - just in case. The main issue is 
that OVAL doesn't always support this. There is no OVAL equivalent to auditctl 
-l, services iptables status, or sysctl -a.

I've mentioned before to the OVAL editorial board that if I could do it over 
again, I'd want to be more careful about combining in-memory checks and on-
disk checks. An example of this might be the partition check which is an 
amalgamation of both. I would prefer a pure on-disk and in-memory 
separation...but its too late.

The only way that forensic scanning can be done is to avoid OVAL in the XCCDF 
and just use a shell script/app or even better use the SCE interface.

Anyways, hope this clears up my thoughts. Its more a case of manual != 
automated tests in a few cases. By and large they do match.

Thanks,
-Steve
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