The technical specification for the security content automation protocol (SCAP) version 1.3

Abstract

AuthorityThis publication has been developed by NIST in accordance with its statutory responsibilities under the Federal Information Security Modernization Act (FISMA) of 2014, 44 U.S.C. § 3551 et seq., Public Law (P.L.) 113-283. NIST is responsible for developing information security standards and guidelines, including minimum requirements for federal information systems, but such standards and guidelines shall not apply to national security systems without the express approval of appropriate federal officials exercising policy authority over such systems. This guideline is consistent with the requirements of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Circular A-130.Nothing in this publication should be taken to contradict the standards and guidelines made mandatory and binding on federal agencies by the Secretary of Commerce under statutory authority. Nor should these guidelines be interpreted as altering or superseding the existing authorities of the Secretary of Commerce, Director of the OMB, or any other federal official. This publication may be used by nongovernmental organizations on a voluntary basis and is not subject to copyright in the United States. Attribution would, however, be appreciated by NIST. Certain commercial entities, equipment, or materials may be identified in this document in order to describe an experimental procedure or concept adequately. Such identification is not intended to imply recommendation or endorsement by NIST, nor is it intended to imply that the entities, materials, or equipment are necessarily the best available for the purpose.There may be references in this publication to other publications currently under development by NIST in accordance with its assigned statutory responsibilities. The information in this publication, including concepts and methodologies, may be used by federal agencies even before the completion of such companion publications. Thus, until each publication is completed, current requirements, guidelines, and procedures, where they exist, remain operative. For planning and transition purposes, federal agencies may wish to closely follow the development of these new publications by NIST.Organizations are encouraged to review all draft publications during public comment periods and provide feedback to NIST. Many NIST cybersecurity publications, other than the ones noted above, are available at https://csrc.nist.gov/publications. ii This publication is available free of charge from: https://doi.org/10.6028/NIST.SP.800-126r3 Comments on this publication may be submitted to: Reports on Computer Systems TechnologyThe Information Technology Laboratory (ITL) at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) promotes the U.S. economy and public welfare by providing technical leadership for the Nation's measurement and standards infrastructure. ITL develops tests, test methods, reference data, proof of concept implementations, and technical analyses to advance the development and productive use of information technology. ITL's responsibilities include...

Towards a Software-Defined Security Framework for Supporting Distributed Cloud

“…The latter validates the usability of XACML in distributed systems, underlining some limitations such as the need for a high granularity of sub-policies and the difficulty of maintaining an encoded security policy. The languages and formats introduced by SCAP protocol constitutes also an interesting support, as they cover many complementary specifications, such as vulnerability descriptions and scorings, that are exploitable for automating security in distributed cloud [18]. These standards are usable in our solution.…”

An Ontology-based Storage of Security Information

“…The developed model is used to implement the logical inference for countermeasure generation. The paper [30] deals with the construction of a common ontology for the SCAP protocol [40]. The SCAP protocol includes the following types of security data: vulnerabilities [6], configurations [3], software and hardware [4], etc.…”

Transitioning to the Security Content Automation Protocol (SCAP) Version 2

“…Since this initial version, there have been three SCAP v1 revisions. The current revision, SCAP 1.3, was released in February 2018 as NIST Special Publication (SP) 800-126 Revision 3 [2]. Over its lifetime, a few critical gaps have been identified in SCAP v1 that need to be addressed to provide a more robust solution:…”