Security Content Automation Protocol (SCAP) Explained in 5 Minutes or Less

SCAP is a suite of specifications standardizing the format and nomenclature by which security software products communicate software flaws and security configuration information.

How is Automating Network Security Help in Mediation of Threats?

In what can only be seen as sheer luck and a near miss, Avinash Jain, who currently works as a security engineer at Microsoft, saved thousands of organizations and government agencies from a catastrophic security mistake.

In 2019, Jain discovered that the security of JIRA had been misconfigured. JIRA is a project management software by Atlassian which is used by over 100,000 government agencies and organizations worldwide.

The misconfiguration allowed Jain to access sensitive information on employees and projects of organizations that use JIRA. Luckily, Jain raised the issue, and it was fixed. If malicious actors had discovered this misconfiguration, the damages incurred by JIRA and organizations using it would have been unfathomable.

Interestingly, security misconfiguration is very common, and the Identity Theft Resource Center reported that misconfigurations are behind a third of the data breaches reported in 2021. Costly mistakes in configurations, regulatory compliance, and efficiency are always bound to occur when network security is handled manually. To avoid such problems automating network security is the way to go.

Automating network security entails using technology to detect, investigate, and mediate network security threats. Typically, software and other tools are deployed to perform security administrative duties such as configurations, monitoring networks for malicious activities, and handling threats that may occur. This is typically done with little or no human intervention.

Automating network security allows organizations to scale and handle many threats, thus avoiding overloading security teams.

Additionally, it helps organizations comply with changing network security laws and policies and avoid misconfiguration errors that occur when human labor is used to handle configurations of security of networks.

Automation also facilitates faster, real-time threat detection and mitigation, thus improving the efficiency of a network’s security. This also leads to higher accuracy and consistency in handling threats, thus minimizing damage and saving time and costs for an organization.

Generally, network security automation helps organizations improve their overall security, avoiding costly data breaches and cyber-attacks. Now, let’s understand Security Content Automation Protocol (SCAP).

Introduction

Security Content Automation Protocol (SCAP) provides standards and protocols designed to organize, express, and measure security-related information, security configuration issues, and post-compilation software flaws in standardized ways. SCAP is essentially a checklist that organizations follow to improve their security.

To organizations, SCAP helps them automate the process of checking for known vulnerabilities, automating the verification of security configuration settings, and generating reports that link low-level settings to high-level requirements. As a result, it helps improve an organization’s security, effectively reducing cyber-attacks and data breaches.

Benefits of SCAP

Organizations stand to benefit a lot from implementing SCAP. Some of these benefits include:

• Better Compliance with Laws and Policies: Regulations are constantly being updated. To evaluate the compliance of organizations through standardized compliance checks, SCAP is used. Therefore, using SCAP allows organizations to comply with existing policies and laws.
• Improved Security of Systems: SCAP helps organizations to identify and address vulnerabilities that may be existent in the enterprise systems. This results in improved security of their systems and better protection from cyber attacks.
• Minimizes Human Error: By providing a checklist to be followed in automating network security, SCAP helps minimize human errors while evaluating and managing a network’s security.
• Helps Organizations Cut Costs: By automating the process of security evaluation and management, SCAP helps organizations minimize the cost that would have been incurred from using human labour and costs from security breaches.
• Improved Efficiency: By reducing reliance on human labour, automating processes such as vulnerability evaluation, and streamlining security processes, SCAP helps organizations enhance their efficiency. It also frees up security personnel allowing them to focus on other pressing tasks.

Enterprise systems must constantly comply with regulations and be secure to minimize attacks and data breaches. Implementing SCAP is thus a good way to ensure they comply with regulations and have very secure systems that can prevent, detect and mitigate threats efficiently.

SCAP Components

A key element in SCAP is a protocol standardizing how software communicates information about software flaws and security configuration. These specifications are also referred to as SCAP components. SCAP components include:

• Common Configuration Enumeration (CCE): This is a dictionary and nomenclature of system configuration issues.
• Common Platform Enumeration (CPE): This is a dictionary and nomenclature of product names and versions.
• Open Vulnerability and Assessment Language (OVAL): This is a language used to specify low-level testing procedures used by checklists.
• Open Checklist Interactive Language (OCIL): This framework guides how to express a set of questions to be presented to a user and how to interpret their responses to the questions.
• Trust Model for Security Automation Data (TMSAD): This describes a common trust model to be applied to the specifications used in a security automation domain.
• Extensible Configuration Checklist Description Format (XCCDF): This is a language used to specify checklists and to report the results of checklists.
• Software Identification (SWID) Tags: These provide a transparent way for organizations to track the software installed on their devices.

The listed SCAP components are what SCAP uses to standardize the communication of software flaws and configurations.

Why is SCAP Important to Your Organization?

Any organization stands to reap huge benefits by using SCAP. First, SCAP provides a standardized framework that an organization can use to evaluate and manage its security, ensuring that its systems are sufficiently secured.

Since SCAP is used to evaluate organizations’ compliance with security regulations, SCAP allows organizations to comply with existing regulations and policies, avoiding penalties. To cap it all, SCAP helps organizations save on cost and manpower and improve their security.

For any organization keen on security and compliance with regulations, SCAP is a must-have.

Consider the following resources to learn more about SCAP and how it can help your organization.

Learning Resources

Security Content Automation Protocol: Step-By-Step Guide

This book on Security Content Automation Protocol, available as a paperback version, offers an in-depth self-assessment that organizations and security professionals can use to improve their understanding of the requirements and elements of the SCAP. 

The book provides a tool that facilitates a rapid self-assessment to determine the level of correspondence between an organization’s existing management practices and procedures and what SCAP requires.

The book is optimized for those unfamiliar with SCAP, allowing those with limited knowledge of it and how it is implemented to assess their organizations using the book. This, in turn, has the benefit of helping an organization improve its overall performance and identify gaps that need to be addressed.

If you don’t have in-depth knowledge of SCAP and still want to see if your organization is compliant, this is a great book to help you do that. However, even those conversant with SCAP can benefit from the book.

Security Content Automation Protocol: A Complete Guide

The Security Content Automation Protocol book aims to empower decision-makers in an organization to perform a thorough self-assessment of their organization. This self-assessment aims to get a clear picture of areas on the SCAP scorecard that need attention and improvement in an organization.

The book has 944 updated case-based questions divided into seven process design areas. These questions are what guide the self-assessment regarding the SCAP.

By taking a self-assessment using the provided questions, organizations can perform diagnostics on SCAP projects, businesses, and organizations using accepted diagnostic standards and practices. Additionally, they will be able to implement best practices that help them meet their goals and integrate new and modern advances in SCAP.

Purchase of the book comes with a self-assessment excel dashboard and a prefilled example of the excel dashboard. Readers also get lifetime access to the self-assessment updates. The book is available as a kindle and paperback version.

Security Content Automation Protocol (SCAP) V 1.3 Validation Program

This is a one-stop shop for all organizations interested in SCAP. This Security Content Automation Protocol: Validation Program book is written by the National Institute of Standards and Technology(NIST), the organization that came up with SCAP.

This book is the latest version of SCAP released by NIST, printed in a paperback version and available as a kindle. Since most copies of SCAP available on the internet are either illegible or miss some pages, this book addresses all that by providing a high-quality copy that includes original commentary of SCAP, which is copyright material.

As a SCAP report, the book defines requirements and test procedures that need to be met for products or modules to achieve one or more SCAP validations. For any organization implementing SCAP, this is a must-have book.

Final Words

SCAP is a key tool that organizations can use to improve their overall security and ensure that measures in place are up to standard. Additionally, organizations must comply with existing regulations that aim to protect users from malicious cyber attackers and protect sensitive data that organizations hold.

Therefore, it greatly recommends that organizations implement SCAP to be compliant with regulations and also to ensure that their systems are securely protected.

If you don’t know how to do this or want to learn more about SCAP and how it can help your organization, feel free to go through the resources suggested in the article.

Next, you can check out the cybersecurity checklist for small to medium businesses.