Today we’re releasing a tool called Nessus Compliance Generator as open source under the BSD License. The full code can be found on the Argonne National Laboratory github.
Nessus has many options to check for audit and compliance issues on databases and systems. However, building the config files to do these types of checks can be tedious and time consuming. To bridge this gap, we’ve built a GUI tool to help you stitch the different pieces together and make building compliance tasks more a data entry task than a task for a sysadmin or a programmer.
Using Nessus to audit Oracle SQL database configurations is fairly straightforward and only requires a few pieces to get moving. The Nessus Compliance Generator (NCG) program has been supplied to assist in building compliance audits to plug in to Nessus. The audit files themselves have a simple xml-like format. Currently supported by our generator tool are the following types of audits:
1. Oracle database compliance: requires a SQL query and an expected output.
2. Windows group membership compliance: requires a group name and expected members.
3. Windows file contents compliance: requires a filename to check on a remote system and a regular expression to validate contents.
Compliance type 1 above requires database credentials to be entered into Nessus. Types 2 and 3 require that SMB file sharing be enabled and require administrator credentials be entered into Nessus. Note that all of the compliance checks we do are read-only queries and that the credentials need not be entered by the person conducting the audit.
Read the full documentation over at github.