The OpenSCAP Project was created to provide an open-source framework to the community which enables integration with the Security Content Automation Protocol (SCAP) suite of standards and capabilities. It is the goal of OpenSCAP to provide a simple, easy to use set of interfaces to serve as the framework for community use of SCAP

SCAP is a line of standards managed by NIST. It was created to provide a standardized approach to maintaining the security of enterprise systems, such as automatically verifying the presence of patches, checking system security configuration settings, and examining systems for signs of compromise.

The SCAP suite contains multiple complex data exchange formats that are to be used to transmit important vulnerability, configuration, and other security data. Historically, there have been few tools that provide a way to query this data in the needed format. This lack of tools makes the barrier to entry very high and discourages adoption of these protocols by the community. It’s our goal to create a framework of libraries to improve the accessibility of SCAP and enhance the usability of the information it represents. Tools for parsing SCAP documents and querying content must be created to achieve this. This requires common set of interfaces to be defined and implemented to meet this need. It is the intent of this project to provide these interfaces and functional examples that would allow others in the open-source and vendor communities to make use of SCAP while minimizing the effort needed to gain value from it.

You can download OpenSCAP here:

openscap-0.5.11.tar.gz

Or read more here.

A paper about cracking SHA-1 originally surfaced in 2005, from a fairly reputable scientific source in China, it was widely publicised nor talked about much.

But then recently, just last month China managed to make a wave out of it, almost 2 years after the initial ‘report’.

It was even Slashdotted on January 20th 2007, the article states the following:

These two main algorithms are currently the crucial technology that electronic signatures and many other password securities use throughout the international community. They are widely used in banking, securities, and e-commerce. SHA-1 has been recognized as the cornerstone for modern Internet security. According to the article, in the early stages of Wang’s research, there were other data encryption researchers who tried to crack it. However, none of them succeeded. This is why in 15 years Hash research had become the domain of hopeless research in many scientists’ minds.

Source: Epoch Times

Bruce Schneier wrote about this in 2005, February in fact, almost 2 full years ago.

SHA-1 Broken

Cryptanalysis of SHA-1

It’s not a major thing though and it’s far beyond anything most criminals could use to thwart national security…or even the security of things based on SHA-1 like OpenSSH.

There are however plenty of replacement algorithms if you are paranoid such as SHA-224, SHA-256, SHA-384, and SHA-512.