Test your rule content in a robust way with minimal effort required using Automatus - the test framework that is integrated into the content project.
Use Automatus to define various scenarios that can test your scanning and remediation code. Ensure that OVAL evaluates as expected under those scenarios. Test your remediation on scenarios that put the system into an incompliant, but fixable state - make sure that your remediations are able to fix such insecure system, so it passes when it is scanned again.
Automatus provisions systems according to test scenarios using VMs or containers. Then, it scans the provisioned systems, and if the scan results in failure, it runs a remediation and rescans. Finally, it retrieves results and presents them, so they can be acted upon.
To test content using VMs, Libvirt backend is used; to test content using containers, either Podman or Docker backend can be used.
Once a domain or container is prepared it can be used indefinitely. Automatus can perform tests focused on a profile or a specific rule.
For Automatus to work, you need to have a backend image prepared for testing. You can use a powerful full-blown VM backend, or a lightweight container backend.
To use Libvirt backend, you need to have:
- These packages installed in your host
openssh-clients
libvirt
libvirt-daemon
python2-libvirt/python3-libvirt
virt-install
(recommended, used byinstall_vm.py
script)expect
(recommended, used byinstall_vm.py
script with--console
option)libvirt-client
(optional, to manage VMs via console)virt-manager
(optional, to manage VMs via GUI)virt-viewer
(optional, to access graphical console of VMs)ansible
(required if remediating via Ansible)edk2-ovmf
(required if you want to install UEFI based machine)
- A VM that fulfils the following requirements:
- Package
qemu-guest-agent
installed - Package
openscap
version 1.2.15 or higher installed root
can login via ssh (it is recommended to setup key-based authentication)root
can install packages (for RHEL, it means subscription enabled).CPE_NAME
is present in/etc/os-release
. Currently, Ubuntu doesn't ship it in the stock image. See this Ubuntu bug.
- Package
An easy way to install your VM is via install_vm.py
script. It will setup a VM according to the requirements, including configuration of a key for SSH login.
Common usage looks like:
$ python install_vm.py --domain test-suite-fedora --distro fedora
By default, the key at ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub
is used. You can change default key used via --ssh-pubkey
option.
By default, the VM will be created on the user hypervisor, i.e. qemu:///session
.
This should be enough for the testing, in case you need the VM to reside under qemu:///system
, use the install script with --libvirt qemu:///system
.
When installing a RHEL VM, you will still need to subscribe it. You can also run installation and provide custom URLs pointing to your repositories:
$ python install_vm.py --domain test-suite-rhel8 --distro rhel8 --url http://baseos_repo_addr --extra-repo http://appstream_repo_addr
By default, the script creates a BIOS based machine. If you need to create UEFI
based machine, supply the --uefi normal
or --uefi secureboot
command line
argument. The script will create UEFI based machine and make necessary changes
to partitioning scheme. Note that the Libvirt backend cannot make snapshots of
UEFI based machines. Therefore, you can't use them with Automatus.
TIP: Create a snapshot as soon as your VM is setup. This way, you can manually revert
in case the test run breaks something and fails to revert. Do not use snapshot names starting with the _ssgts
prefix.
You can create a snapshot using virsh
or virt-manager
.
There are 2 container backends supported, Podman and Docker.
The container image needs to be prepared so it can accept ssh connections from root
, and run OpenSCAP scan.
The image needs to fulfil the following requirements:
- Package
openssh-server
installedroot
's.ssh/authorized_keys
is setup with correct permissions- the container's server host keys have to be in place
- Packages
scp
andopenssh-clients
are installedscp
requires more than a ssh server on the server-side
- Package
openscap-scanner
version 1.2.15 or higher installed - You may want to include other packages, as base images tend to be bare-bone and tests may require more packages to be present.
You can use test_suite-*
Dockerfiles in the content/Dockerfiles
directory to build the images.
To use Podman backend, you need to have:
podman
package installed
Automatus will interact with the container by means of the root SSH access. If you don't have an SSH key pair, setup a key without passphrase, so the procedure could happen without any additional interaction. You can skip this step if you already have an SSH key pair.
ssh-keygen -N ""
NOTE: With Podman you don't have to be root in order to run tests and manage containers. But if you prefer to set up your test containers as superuser do keep in mind that root user typically doesn't have an SSH key and you have to create it with sudo ssh-keygen -N "" command before moving forward. You can check if your root user has the key with a command like this: sudo test -f /root/.ssh/id_rsa && echo "Root user already has an id_rsa key" || echo "Root user has no id_rsa key"
Now when we all set with SSH keys let's build the container. Go into the Dockerfiles
directory of the project, and execute the following:
public_key="$(cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub)"
podman build --build-arg CLIENT_PUBLIC_KEY="$public_key" -t ssg_test_suite -f test_suite-rhel .
or just call the build_test_container.sh
script.
NOTE: If you are setting up the suite as superuser (i.e. sudo podman build ...) use public_key="$(sudo cat /root/.ssh/id_rsa.pub)" instead of the first command.
To use Docker backend, you need to have:
- The docker Python module installed. You may have to use
pip
to install it on older distributions s.a. RHEL 7, runningpip install --user docker
asroot
will do the trick of installing it only for theroot
user. - the Docker service running, and
- Rights that allow you to start/stop containers and to create images. This is achieved by:
- using
sudo
with everydocker
command, or; - create a
docker
group, then add yourself to it and restartdocker
. Depending on your OS, you may need to logout for the group change to apply.
- using
The procedure is same as using Podman, you just swap the podman
call with docker
. But since Docker does not support rootless containers you will have to take superuser route of the guide.
The test scenarios are used to test rules. They modify the system configuration so that OpenSCAP can return expected results.
The test scenarios for a rule are located in tests
subdirectory in rule
directory. The test scenarios are written in Bash. The format of the file name
is scenario_name.expected_scan_result.sh
, where scenario_name
is an
arbitrary name, and expected_scan_result
is the result of the evaluation of
the rule that oscap
should return when the rule is evaluated.
expected_scan_result
can be one of pass
, fail
or notapplicable
. It's
very important to keep this naming form.
For example:
something.pass.sh
: Success scenario - script is expected to prepare machine in such way that the rule is expected to pass.something.fail.sh
: Fail scenario - script is expected to break machine so the rule fails. If initial scan fails as expected, Automatus tries to remediate machine and expects evaluation to pass after the remediation.
Scenarios are simple Bash scripts. A scenario starts with a header which provides metadata. The metadata are parsed by the test framework and affect the test runs. After the header, arbitrary Bash commands can follow.
The header consists of comments (starting by #
). Possible keys are:
packages
is a comma-separated list of packages to install. Note that each package can be overridden by its platform-specific alternative if listed underplatform_package_overrides
in the product YAML. You should use the most common package names in this field and provide an alternative for any platform-specific names in theplatform_package_overrides
field.platform
is a comma-separated list of platforms where the test scenario can be run. This is similar toplatform
used in our remediations. Examples of values:multi_platform_rhel
,Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10
,multi_platform_all
. Ifplatform
is not specified in the header,multi_platform_all
is assumed.profiles
is a comma-separated list of profiles to which this scenario is restricted. Use this only if the scenario makes sense only in a specific profile. Typically, a rule doesn't depend on a profile and behaves the same way regardless the profile it's a part of. If the rule is parametrized by variables (XCCDF Values), use thevariables
key instead. This key is intended to be used in regression testing of bugs in profiles, it isn't intended for casual use.check
is a string specifying one of the available check engine types (oval
,sce
,any
). It specifies for which check engine the scenario should be executed. The special valueany
means that this scenario works with any check engine and it's the default behavior that is used if this key isn't provided.remediation
is a string specifying one of the allowed remediation types (eg.bash
,ansible
,none
). Thenone
value means that the tested rule has no implemented remediation. Thenone
value can also be used in case that remediation breaks test environment (for example unmounting /tmp in a test scenario would break test runs, because OpenSCAP generates reports into the /tmp directory).templates
has no effect at the moment.variables
is a comma-separated list of XCCDF values that sets a different default value for XCCDF variables in a form<variable name>=<value>
. Typically, you use only one ofprofile
orvariables
in scenario metadata - default values are effective only if the variable is not defined using a selector, which is exactly what profiles do.
Examples of test scenario:
Using platform
and variables
metadata:
#!/bin/bash
# platform = Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9,multi_platform_fedora
# variables = auth_enabled=yes,var_example_1=value_example
echo "KerberosAuthentication $auth_enabled" >> /etc/ssh/sshd_config
Each scenario script is processed under the same jinja context as the
corresponding OVAL and remediation content. This means that product-specific
information is known to the scenario scripts at upload time (for example,
{{{ grub2_boot_path }}}
), allowing them to work across products. This
also means Jinja macros such as {{{ bash_package_install(...) }}}
work to
install/remove specific packages during the course of testing (such as, if
it is desired to both install and remove a package in the same scenario for
the package_installed
rules).
Note that this does have some limitations: knowledge of the profile (and the
variables it has and the values they take) is still not provided to the test
scenario. The above # profiles
or # variables
directives will still have
to be used to add any profile-specific information.
Additionally, we have enabled test scenarios located under the templated
directory, shared/templates/.../tests
. Unlike with build-time content,
tests
does not need to be located in the template's manifest (at
template.yml
). Instead, Automatus will automatically parse each rule and
prefer rule-directory-specific test scenarios over any templated scenarios
that the rule uses. (E.g., if installed.pass.sh
is present in the
template package_installed
and in the tests/
subdirectory of the rule
directory, the latter takes precedence over the former).
In addition to the Jinja context described above, the contents of the template
variables (after processing in template.py
) are also available to the
test scenario. This enables template-specific checking.
You can place a test_config.yml
file in rule's tests
folder to control usage of templated scenarios
if they don't fit for that particular rule for some reason.
The file is jinja2-capable and product-aware, and you can use keys allow_templated_scenarios
or deny_templated_scenarios
that expect to contain a list of scenario basenames (including e.g. pass.sh
suffix) to either test or to block.
If you want to disable templated scenarios for a rule completely, allow only a scenario that doesn't exist, s.a. none
.
Let's add test scenarios for rule accounts_password_minlen_login_defs
.
- Create
tests
directory within rule directory (in this case/linux_os/guide/system/accounts/accounts-restrictions/password_expiration/accounts_password_minlen_login_defs/tests
further referenced as DIR). - write a few fail scripts - for example removing the line, commenting it, wrong value, etc. into DIR
- write a pass script into DIR - (some rules can have more than one pass scenario)
- build the data stream by running
./build_product --datastream-only fedora
- run
automatus.py
with command:
./automatus.py rule --libvirt qemu:///session ssg-test-suite-fedora accounts_password_minlen_login_defs
Example of test scenarios for this rule can be found at: #3697
Test scenarios can use files from /tests/shared
directory. This directory
and its contents is copied to the target VM or container together with the
test scenarios. The path to the directory is accessible in Bash using $SHARED
variable.
For example, script /tests/shared/setup_config_files.sh
can be sourced in
the following way:
. $SHARED/setup_config_files.sh
If you happen to have many similar test scenarios, consider extracting the common code to the shared directory.
To test you profile or rule use automatus.py
script. It can take your SCAP source data stream, and test it on the specified backend.
Automatus can test a whole profile or just a specific rule within a profile.
Mode of operation, specify one of the following commands;
rule
: Evaluate a rule, remediate, and evaluate again in context of test scenarios.profile
: Evaluate, remediate and evaluate again using selected profilecombined
: Evaluate, remediate, and evaluate again the rules from a profile in context of test scenarios.template
: Evaluate, remediate, and evaluate again the rules using a given template in context of test scenarios.
Specify backend and image to use:
- To use VM backend, use the following option on the command line:
- Libvirt -
--libvirt <hypervisor> <domain>
hypervisor
: Typically, you will use theqemu:///session
, orqemu:///system
. It depends on where your VM resides.domain
:libvirt
domain, which is basically name of the virtual machine.
- Libvirt -
NOTE: It might happen, especially while using other distros than Fedora or RHEL (for example Arch), that you encounter the following error:
libvirt: QEMU Driver error : operation failed Failed to take snapshot: Error: Nested VMX virtualization does not support live migration yet
This error might be followed by Python tracebacks where the above message is repeated. First make sure that you are running Automatus on the physical machine and that you really DO NOT use nested virtualization by running VM in VM.
If you pass this requirement, it might happen that nested virtualization is enabled for your KVM kernel module. Libvirt will refuse to do live migration in this case. You can check this by running:
$ cat /sys/module/kvm_intel/parameters/nested
If you see "Y" then the nested virtualization is enabled for the KVM kernel module and it needs to be disabled. This can be done temporarily by running:
# modprobe -r kvm_intel
# modprobe kvm_intel nested=0
or permanently by putting
options kvm_intel nested=0
into a file ending with .conf and placed into the /etc/modprobe.d/ directory.
- To use container backends, use the following options on the command line:
- Podman -
--container <base image name>
- Docker -
--docker <base image name>
- Podman -
Specify SCAP source data stream to use:
--datastream
: Path to the data stream that you want to use for scanning. It will be transferred to the scanned system via SSH. The option can be omitted if there is only one data stream in the build directory.
Specify as last argument the id of a profile or rule to be tested.
Note:Also, as containers may get any IP address, a conflict may happen in your local client's known_hosts
file.
You might have a version of oscap-ssh
that doesn't support ssh connection customization at the client-side, so it may be a good idea to disable known hosts checks for all hosts if you are testing on a VM or under a separate user.
You can do that by putting following lines in your $HOME/.ssh/config
file:
StrictHostKeyChecking no
UserKnownHostsFile /dev/null
All test logs are stored in logs
directory. The specific diretory is shown at the beginning of each test run.
If you want more verbose logs, pass the --dontclean
argument that preserves result files, reports and verbose scanner output
even in cases when the test result went according to the expectations.
If your system has the oval-graph package installed that provides the arf-to-html
command,
Automatus will use it to extract OVAL evaluation details from ARFs, and save those condensed reports to the logs
directory
even if the --dontclean
argument has been specified.
./automatus.py rule RULE ...
In this mode, you supply one or more rule IDs or wildcards as positional arguments. Unlike the profile mode, each rule is evaluated and tested independently, one-by-one.
Rule-based testing enables to perform two kinds of tests:
-
Check tests: The system is set up into a compliant, or a non-compliant state.
Typically, the compliant state is different from the default or post-remediation state. The scanner is supposed to correctly identify the state of the system, so it is checked against false positives and false negatives.
-
Remediation tests: The system is set up into a non-compliant state, and remediation is performed.
If you would like to test the rule sshd_disable_kerb_auth
:
Using Libvirt:
./automatus.py rule --libvirt qemu:///system ssg-test-suite-rhel9 --datastream ../build/ssg-rhel9-ds.xml sshd_disable_kerb_auth
Using Podman:
./automatus.py rule --container ssg_test_suite --datastream ../build/ssg-rhel9-ds.xml sshd_disable_kerb_auth
or just call the test_rule_in_container.sh
script that passes the backend options for you
in addition to --remove-machine-only
and --remove-platforms
that remove some testing limitations of the container backend.
Using Docker:
./automatus.py rule --docker ssg_test_suite --datastream ../build/ssg-rhel9-ds.xml sshd_disable_kerb_auth
Notice we didn't use full rule name on the command line. The prefix xccdf_org.ssgproject.content_rule_
is added if not provided.
It is possible to use wildcards, eg accounts_passwords*
will run test scenarios for all
rules which ID starts with accounts_passwords
.
If the data stream file path is not supplied, auto detection is attempted by
looking into the /build
directory.
In the rule mode, the Automatus follows the profiles
metadata key from the
scenario headers. It will run test scenario for each profile listed in this
profile
key. If there is no profiles
key in the test scenario header the
Automatus will use the virtual (all)
profile. It is a profile that contains
all the rules.
Moreover, there is the --profile
option which can be used to override the
profile selection from profiles metadata so every test scenario will be executed
only against the profile selected by this command-line argument and variable
selections will be done according to this profile.
Use --debug
option, to investigate a test scenario which is not evaluating to expected result.
Automatus will pause the test run, and you will be able to SSH into the environment to inspect its state manually.
In this operation mode, you specify the profile
command and you supply the
profile ID as a positional argument. Automatus then runs scans over the
target domain and remediates it based on particular profile.
To test RHEL9 STIG Profile on a VM:
./automatus.py profile --libvirt qemu:///session ssg-test-suite-rhel9 --datastream ../build/ssg-rhel9-ds.xml stig
To test Fedora Standard Profile on a Podman container:
./automatus.py profile --container ssg_test_suite --datastream ../build/ssg-fedora-ds.xml standard
To test Fedora Standard Profile on a Docker container:
./automatus.py profile --docker ssg_test_suite --datastream ../build/ssg-fedora-ds.xml standard
Note that profile-id
is matched by the suffix, so it works the same as in oscap
tool
(you can use oscap info --profiles
to see available profiles).
Sometimes you would like to skip a rule in the profile because they are too slow to test, or you know a rule doesn't have a remediation and you get less value by testing it.
Also, some rules need to be skipped in the profile mode because they might break
the test backend. For example, the rule sshd_disable_root_login
which disables
root login to the tested VM will interfere with tests execution, because
the Automatus uses root user in all underlying SSH commands.
For these situations, use ds_unselect_rules.sh
to unselect these rules in all profiles of the data stream.
It will copy your data stream to /tmp
and unselect rules listed in rules_list
./ds_unselect_rules.sh <datastream> <rules_list>
Where:
datastream
: is the data stream to unselect rules fromrules_list
: is a file with list of complete rule IDs, one per line
Example usage:
./ds_unselect_rules.sh ../build/ssg-fedora-ds.xml unselect_rules_list
Tip: file unselect_rules_list
contains a few typical rules you may want to skip
In this mode, you are testing the rules selected by a profile, using the contexts provided by each rule's test scenarios. This mode provides an easy way of performing rule-based testing on all rules that are part of a profile.
In the combined mode, all rules selected by the given profile are tested. However, each rule is evaluated and tested separately.
The test scenarios are chosen to execute based on the presence and contents of
the profiles
metadata key in the test scenario header. If there is no
profiles
metadata key in a test scenario the test scenario will be executed
using the virtual (all)
profile. If there is a profiles
key in a test
scenario and the tested profile is listed under the profiles
key, the test
scenario will be executed using the tested profile. If there is the profiles
key but it doesn't contain the tested profile the test scenario will be skipped
and won't be executed. Most of the test scenarios do not have profiles
key,
therefore using the virtual (all)
profile is the most frequent behavior.
This way we can re-use test scenarios when testing any profile.
If you want to have a specific regression test only for a certain profile(s)
which relies on a specific value being selected by some variable in this profile
you need to use the profiles
key in the test scenarios metadata to limit test
scenario so it is executed only when testing profiles listed there.
# profiles = xccdf_org.ssgproject.content_profile_ID1,xccdf_org.ssgproject.content_profile_ID2,...
If a rule doesn't have any test scenario, it will be skipped and a INFO
message printed at the end.
If you would like to test all profile's rules against their test scenarios:
./automatus.py combined --libvirt qemu:///system ssg-test-suite-rhel8 --datastream ../build/ssg-rhel8-ds.xml ospp
./automatus.py template ... <template_name1>[ <template_name2> <template_name3> ...]
In this mode you can test all rules that use a template. This is very useful when one fixes a bug or makes improvements to the template. Each rule may use the template in a specfic way and this provides a way to easily run the test scenarios for all rules based on their template.
The test scenarios executed are based on the template and the rule that uses it. If the specified template doesn't have tests, only the rule's test scenarios are executed, and if a rule doesn't have test scenarios it won't be tested. If the specified template does have tests they are combined with the rule's tests, this is the same behavior we see in the rule mode.
The rule tests results are saved as results.json
into the corresponding log directory.
You can then analyze those results by running e.g.
python analyze_results.py $(find . -name results.json)
The tool will print some general statistics and it will give you more detailed information about scenarios that yielded different results. Sometimes, different results may have been caused by different test environments, whereas sometimes the security content is different, and those scans can be identified by respective scanning dates only.
1 - Test suite fails to test rule with the message:
Rule <rule_id> has not been evaluated! Wrong profile selected in test scenario?
If you are using SCAP 1.3 content (which is built by default) and you are sure that you have selected the rule in the particular profile, it might be that the target scan environment has an OpenSCAP version contains a bug with SCAP 1.3 content. To solve this issue you can either update the OpenSCAP package in the target scan environment to the latest version or build SCAP 1.2 content. To build SCAP 1.2 content check .