[CentOS] CentOS Security Advisories OVAL feed??

Wed Aug 5 19:42:21 UTC 2020
Carl George <carl at redhat.com>

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

Yes.  Security errata for previous Enterprise Linux minor releases are
a Red Hat product called Extended Update Support (EUS) [0].  CentOS
doesn't build EUS updates.  CentOS point releases are a point in time
reference and an implementation detail, not something you should try
to lock your system to.  When someone says they are using CentOS X.Y,
that just means that they haven't updated their system since X.Y+1 was
released.  Effectively, you don't have CentOS 8.1, you have outdated
CentOS 8.

[0] https://access.redhat.com/articles/rhel-eus

On Tue, Aug 4, 2020 at 11:34 AM <centos at niob.at> wrote:
>
> 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
>
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-- 
Carl George