[CentOS] CentOS Security Advisories OVAL feed??

Tue Aug 4 16:34:12 UTC 2020
centos at niob.at <centos at niob.at>

Dear List,

I have spent some time playing around with oscap and the RHEL OVAL feed 
(https://www.redhat.com/security/data/oval/v2/RHEL8/, also check Chapter 
16 of the RHEL 8 Design Guide). Because I could not find an existing 
OVAL file for CentOS, I downloaded one of the RHEL8 files and managed to 
modify (eg. the rhel-8.1-e4s.oval.xml) it to make it work on a CentOS 
machine. Basically I just had to change the package signing key check to 
use the CentOS key and I had to replace the redhat-release RPM package 
name with "centos-release". Obviously, this would violate all kinds of 
rights if redistributed, due to the fact that the upstream vendor is 
named all over the place, but technically it "worked".

On an internal system running a freshly updated CentOS 8.1 system I 
ended up with three errors, titled:

* RHSA-2019:4269: container-tools:rhel8 security and bug fix update 
(Important)

* RHSA-2019:3403: container-tools:rhel8 security, bug fix, and 
enhancement update (Important)

* RHSA-2019:2799: nginx:1.14 security update (Important)

This raises some questions (some of them connected), namely:

Q1) There are no equivalent CESA advisories for those RHSA advisories: 
why is that? Note that there are also no equivalent CentOS packages to 
those mentioned in the RHSA advisories. (My guess: because, when the 
advisories where issued, Centos already had moved on to 8.2)

Q2) Does this indicate a problem in the release process / handling of 
upstream updates on the side of the CentOS project? Were the advisories 
missed at the time of issuance?

Q3) Does this indicate that only the latest CentOS (minor) release can 
be considered "secure" or "patched"?

Q4) Is there a native OVAL file released from the CentOS project 
covering these issues? It could be extremely similar to the RHEL one, 
but it should take the answers to the above questions into account (eg. 
it could require the latests minor-release and there would only be one 
file for CentOS 8 if the answer to Q3 is "yes").

Q5) If the answer to the last question is "no": shouldn't there be such 
a resource?

Thanks for any answers.

peter