Hello all,
With the increasing number of products and profiles in ComplianceAsCode/content, keeping track of the policies, profiles and people involved has become more complex. In an effort to better maintain the profiles in the project, I'm looking for a way to have the following questions easily answered WRT to a profile:
- Who should be consulted in case of questions about how a profile aligns (or should be aligned) with the policy? - Where does one get to know about new policy releases? - When is a policy version considered out of date?
Below is a draft proposal of a set of *optional* metadata to be added to the ".profile" file. Everything is pretty much free form and optional.
- policy_hub: (URL pointing to page or organization that publishes the policy) - version: (version of the policy implemented) - comes_into_force: (text stating when a policy starts being enforced, in other words, when a policy version is in practice obsolete) - maintainers: (contact of policy SME, stakeholder, or person responsible for the profile, can be in form of GitHub handle for example)
Here is an example of how it can look like. (I have used profiles with known implicit maintainers or SMEs, in CC): https://github.com/yuumasato/scap-security-guide/commit/ba967716ef9660483572...
I think these data will bring profile transparency to project maintainers, and profile maintainers can be kept in the loop with regards to changes in the profiles they care about.
Let me know what you think about it, do you have other ideas?
Anything that is metadata should conform to the Dublin Core per the XCCDF specification for the .profile files, or it can be a commented out section at the top of the .profile. Alternatively, a single file like maintainers or profile maintainers would be better as a single source of truth.
nitpick: I think that "comes_into_force" should be something else like "when", "applicability", or "profile_enforcement". But this also makes me wonder if tracking this is even necessary as technically in all compliance regimes a newly released profile becomes applicable on release.
On Fri, Aug 7, 2020 at 9:21 AM Watson Sato wsato@redhat.com wrote:
Hello all,
With the increasing number of products and profiles in ComplianceAsCode/content, keeping track of the policies, profiles and people involved has become more complex. In an effort to better maintain the profiles in the project, I'm looking for a way to have the following questions easily answered WRT to a profile:
- Who should be consulted in case of questions about how a profile
aligns (or should be aligned) with the policy?
- Where does one get to know about new policy releases?
- When is a policy version considered out of date?
Below is a draft proposal of a set of *optional* metadata to be added to the ".profile" file. Everything is pretty much free form and optional.
- policy_hub: (URL pointing to page or organization that publishes the
policy)
- version: (version of the policy implemented)
- comes_into_force: (text stating when a policy starts being enforced,
in other words, when a policy version is in practice obsolete)
- maintainers: (contact of policy SME, stakeholder, or person
responsible for the profile, can be in form of GitHub handle for example)
Here is an example of how it can look like. (I have used profiles with known implicit maintainers or SMEs, in CC):
https://github.com/yuumasato/scap-security-guide/commit/ba967716ef9660483572...
I think these data will bring profile transparency to project maintainers, and profile maintainers can be kept in the loop with regards to changes in the profiles they care about.
Let me know what you think about it, do you have other ideas?
-- Watson Sato Security Technologies | Red Hat, Inc _______________________________________________ scap-security-guide mailing list -- scap-security-guide@lists.fedorahosted.org To unsubscribe send an email to scap-security-guide-leave@lists.fedorahosted.org Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedorahosted.org/archives/list/scap-security-guide@lists.fedor...
On Sat, Aug 8, 2020 at 12:10 AM Gabe Alford redhatrises@gmail.com wrote:
Anything that is metadata should conform to the Dublin Core per the XCCDF specification for the .profile files, or it can be a commented out section at the top of the .profile.
I didn't envision this metadata to be included in the built XCCDF profile, so I didn't look into the formal syntax. And it is laid out as yaml to ease any eventual build system future automation.
Alternatively, a single file like maintainers or profile maintainers would be better as a single source of truth.
That could work too, in this case I would make the file per product, to keep them simple.
nitpick: I think that "comes_into_force" should be something else like "when", "applicability", or "profile_enforcement".
Thank you for the suggestions, I was not sure what would be a good name for the field.
But this also makes me wonder if tracking this is even necessary as
technically in all compliance regimes a newly released profile becomes applicable on release.
The core of this field is clarity and understanding how the policy is applied in practice, if it is the case that all policies and profiles are instantly unusable when a new version is released, this field is unnecessary. The proposal for "comes_into_force" assumed that the organizations implementing and/or enforcing the policy don't update instantly, and have a time frame to adapt.
On Fri, Aug 7, 2020 at 9:21 AM Watson Sato wsato@redhat.com wrote:
Hello all,
With the increasing number of products and profiles in ComplianceAsCode/content, keeping track of the policies, profiles and people involved has become more complex. In an effort to better maintain the profiles in the project, I'm looking for a way to have the following questions easily answered WRT to a profile:
- Who should be consulted in case of questions about how a profile
aligns (or should be aligned) with the policy?
- Where does one get to know about new policy releases?
- When is a policy version considered out of date?
Below is a draft proposal of a set of *optional* metadata to be added to the ".profile" file. Everything is pretty much free form and optional.
- policy_hub: (URL pointing to page or organization that publishes
the policy)
- version: (version of the policy implemented)
- comes_into_force: (text stating when a policy starts being
enforced, in other words, when a policy version is in practice obsolete)
- maintainers: (contact of policy SME, stakeholder, or person
responsible for the profile, can be in form of GitHub handle for example)
Here is an example of how it can look like. (I have used profiles with known implicit maintainers or SMEs, in CC):
https://github.com/yuumasato/scap-security-guide/commit/ba967716ef9660483572...
I think these data will bring profile transparency to project maintainers, and profile maintainers can be kept in the loop with regards to changes in the profiles they care about.
Let me know what you think about it, do you have other ideas?
-- Watson Sato Security Technologies | Red Hat, Inc _______________________________________________ scap-security-guide mailing list -- scap-security-guide@lists.fedorahosted.org To unsubscribe send an email to scap-security-guide-leave@lists.fedorahosted.org Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedorahosted.org/archives/list/scap-security-guide@lists.fedor...
scap-security-guide mailing list -- scap-security-guide@lists.fedorahosted.org To unsubscribe send an email to scap-security-guide-leave@lists.fedorahosted.org Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedorahosted.org/archives/list/scap-security-guide@lists.fedor...
I have remarks to Gabe's remarks, but I add them to Watson's reply, so the thread doesn't bifurcate.
On 10. 08. 20 10:22, Watson Sato wrote:
On Sat, Aug 8, 2020 at 12:10 AM Gabe Alford <redhatrises@gmail.com mailto:redhatrises@gmail.com> wrote:
Anything that is metadata should conform to the Dublin Core per the XCCDF specification for the .profile files, or it can be a commented out section at the top of the .profile.
As the purpose is to record key properties of the profile, I am not in favor of specifying them as comments - one can't parse them reliably, and as we would like this to save us some work, we want to have at most one schema that can be approached by computers.
Next, the schema presented by Watson reflects what we think is useful to record. I wouldn't compromise here because of the Dublin thing. I understand this as a resource for content authors, it could possibly be inserted as a table into the profile description, and we could have a test that key profiles have this record. Putting this info into profile XCCDF metadata makes sense, but I wouldn't use this as a factor that would restrict the data set that we would like to record.
I didn't envision this metadata to be included in the built XCCDF profile, so I didn't look into the formal syntax. And it is laid out as yaml to ease any eventual build system future automation.
Alternatively, a single file like maintainers or profile maintainers would be better as a single source of truth.That could work too, in this case I would make the file per product, to keep them simple.
I don't get the single source of truth thing - wouldn't it be the respective profile file? Typically, one is interested in who maintains a particular profile, not in how many profiles one person maintains. But more importantly, I think it is important to see who maintains the profile when one edits the profile file, or when one reviews the change. Having two files - one with the profile definition, and the other one that may or may not contain information about possible profile stakeholders - is cumbersome.
nitpick: I think that "comes_into_force" should be something else like "when", "applicability", or "profile_enforcement".Thank you for the suggestions, I was not sure what would be a good name for the field.
But this also makes me wonder if tracking this is even necessary as technically in all compliance regimes a newly released profile becomes applicable on release.The core of this field is clarity and understanding how the policy is applied in practice, if it is the case that all policies and profiles are instantly unusable when a new version is released, this field is unnecessary. The proposal for "comes_into_force" assumed that the organizations implementing and/or enforcing the policy don't update instantly, and have a time frame to adapt.
I see this as a possibility to at least loosely define shape of profiles - if a stakeholder claims that they expect the profile to be behind at most six months, then comparison of a couple of numbers can quickly tell us whether the profile is good, on track, or whether it was left behind.
Below is a draft proposal of a set of *optional* metadata to be added to the ".profile" file. Everything is pretty much free form and optional.
- policy_hub: (URL pointing to page or organization that publishes the policy)
- version: (version of the policy implemented)
- comes_into_force: (text stating when a policy starts being enforced, in other words, when a policy version is in practice obsolete)
- maintainers: (contact of policy SME, stakeholder, or person responsible for the profile, can be in form of GitHub handle for example)
I see an issue with maintainers - we can mix up at least GH usernames and e-mails - what about considering it a list of dicts, so we could have e.g.
maintainers:
- github: redhatrises - github: yuumasato email: wsato@redhat.com
On Fri, Aug 7, 2020 at 9:21 AM Watson Sato <wsato@redhat.com <mailto:wsato@redhat.com>> wrote: ...
scap-security-guide@lists.fedorahosted.org
-
Gabe Alford -
Matej Tyc -
Watson Sato