We are going to be looking at one of a set of tools maintained by Red Hat called OpenSCAP. Before we continue, I feel I should warn you that the next section is going to contain a lot of abbreviations, starting with SCAP.
So, what is SCAP? The Security Content Automation Protocol (SCAP) is an open standard that encompasses several components, all of which are open standards themselves, to build a framework that allows you to automatically assess and remediate your hosts against the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Special Publication 800-53.
This publication is a catalog of controls that is applied to all U.S. federal IT systems, apart from those maintained by the National Security Agency (NSA). These controls have been put in place to help implement the Federal Information Security Management Act of 2002 (FISMA) across U.S federal departments.
SCAP...