- <title>Støtte for forskjellige kamera-ikoner på overvåkningskamerakartet</title>
- <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/St_tte_for_forskjellige_kamera_ikoner_p__overv_kningskamerakartet.html</link>
- <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/St_tte_for_forskjellige_kamera_ikoner_p__overv_kningskamerakartet.html</guid>
- <pubDate>Sun, 2 Jan 2011 11:05:00 +0100</pubDate>
- <description><p>I dag har jeg justert litt på kartet over overvåkningskamera, og
-laget støtte for å gi fotobokser (automatisk trafikk-kontroll) og
-andre overvåkningskamera forskjellige symboler på kartet, slik at det
-er enklere å se forskjell på kamera som vegvesenet kontrollerer og
-andre kamera. Resultatet er lagt ut på
-<a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/surveillance-norway/">kartet
-over overvåkningskamera i Norge</a>. Det er nå 93 fotobokser av 380
-totalt
-<a href="http://www.vegvesen.no/Fag/Fokusomrader/Trafikksikkerhet/Automatisk+trafikkontroll+ATK">i
-følge vegvesenet</a> og 80 andre kamera på kartet, totalt 173 kamera.
-Takk til de 26 stykkene som har bidratt til kamerainformasjonen så
-langt.</p>
+ <title>Using NVD and CPE to track CVEs in locally maintained software</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_NVD_and_CPE_to_track_CVEs_in_locally_maintained_software.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_NVD_and_CPE_to_track_CVEs_in_locally_maintained_software.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Fri, 28 Jan 2011 15:40:00 +0100</pubDate>
+ <description><p>The last few days I have looked at ways to track open security
+issues here at my work with the University of Oslo. My idea is that
+it should be possible to use the information about security issues
+available on the Internet, and check our locally
+maintained/distributed software against this information. It should
+allow us to verify that no known security issues are forgotten. The
+CVE database listing vulnerabilities seem like a great central point,
+and by using the package lists from Debian mapped to CVEs provided by
+the testing security team, I believed it should be possible to figure
+out which security holes were present in our free software
+collection.</p>
+
+<p>After reading up on the topic, it became obvious that the first
+building block is to be able to name software packages in a unique and
+consistent way across data sources. I considered several ways to do
+this, for example coming up with my own naming scheme like using URLs
+to project home pages or URLs to the Freshmeat entries, or using some
+existing naming scheme. And it seem like I am not the first one to
+come across this problem, as MITRE already proposed and implemented a
+solution. Enter the <a href="http://cpe.mitre.org/index.html">Common
+Platform Enumeration</a> dictionary, a vocabulary for referring to
+software, hardware and other platform components. The CPE ids are
+mapped to CVEs in the <a href="http://web.nvd.nist.gov/">National
+Vulnerability Database</a>, allowing me to look up know security
+issues for any CPE name. With this in place, all I need to do is to
+locate the CPE id for the software packages we use at the university.
+This is fairly trivial (I google for 'cve cpe $package' and check the
+NVD entry if a CVE for the package exist).</p>
+
+<p>To give you an example. The GNU gzip source package have the CPE
+name cpe:/a:gnu:gzip. If the old version 1.3.3 was the package to
+check out, one could look up
+<a href="http://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/search?cpe=cpe%3A%2Fa%3Agnu%3Agzip:1.3.3">cpe:/a:gnu:gzip:1.3.3
+in NVD</a> and get a list of 6 security holes with public CVE entries.
+The most recent one is
+<a href="http://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/detail?vulnId=CVE-2010-0001">CVE-2010-0001</a>,
+and at the bottom of the NVD page for this vulnerability the complete
+list of affected versions is provided.</p>
+
+<p>The NVD database of CVEs is also available as a XML dump, allowing
+for offline processing of issues. Using this dump, I've written a
+small script taking a list of CPEs as input and list all CVEs
+affecting the packages represented by these CPEs. One give it CPEs
+with version numbers as specified above and get a list of open
+security issues out.</p>
+
+<p>Of course for this approach to be useful, the quality of the NVD
+information need to be high. For that to happen, I believe as many as
+possible need to use and contribute to the NVD database. I notice
+RHEL is providing
+<a href="https://www.redhat.com/security/data/metrics/rhsamapcpe.txt">a
+map from CVE to CPE</a>, indicating that they are using the CPE
+information. I'm not aware of Debian and Ubuntu doing the same.</p>
+
+<p>To get an idea about the quality for free software, I spent some
+time making it possible to compare the CVE database from Debian with
+the CVE database in NVD. The result look fairly good, but there are
+some inconsistencies in NVD (same software package having several
+CPEs), and some inaccuracies (NVD not mentioning buggy packages that
+Debian believe are affected by a CVE). Hope to find time to improve
+the quality of NVD, but that require being able to get in touch with
+someone maintaining it. So far my three emails with questions and
+corrections have not seen any reply, but I hope contact can be
+established soon.</p>
+
+<p>An interesting application for CPEs is cross platform package
+mapping. It would be useful to know which packages in for example
+RHEL, OpenSuSe and Mandriva are missing from Debian and Ubuntu, and
+this would be trivial if all linux distributions provided CPE entries
+for their packages.</p>