OVAL
From SCADApedia
Overview
The Open Vulnerability and Assessment Language (OVAL) is an attempt to standardize content for security tools and applications. It is funded by US-CERT and the Department of Homeland Security. The OVAL website offers this description:
Open Vulnerability and Assessment Language (OVAL) is an international, information security, community standard to promote open and publicly available security content, and to standardize the transfer of this information across the entire spectrum of security tools and services. OVAL includes a language used to encode system details, and an assortment of content repositories held throughout the community. The language standardizes the three main steps of the assessment process: representing configuration information of systems for testing; analyzing the system for the presence of the specified machine state (vulnerability, configuration, patch state, etc.); and reporting the results of this assessment. The repositories are collections of publicly available and open content that utilize the language.
OVAL defines a schema for each of the three parts of an assessment as follows:
- OVAL System Characteristics schema for representing system information
- OVAL Definition schema for expressing a specific machine state
- OVAL Results schema for reporting the results of an assessment
SCADA Impact
Digital Bond, as part of the Bandolier project, is developing XCCDF/OVAL files for many control system applications that define a best practice security configuration. These files can be integrated into a variety of security tools.
