[Oval-devel] Sussen project found

[Javier Fernández-Sanguino Peña]

On Wed, Jul 18, 2007 at 12:22:57AM +0500, Pavel Vinogradov wrote:
>   During my investigation about OVAL textfilecontent_test i go to ask
> some question in google.
> And it points me to one very interesting project - sussen
> (http://dev.mmgsecurity.com/projects/sussen/). This project written on
> C# an based om Gnome desktop, but it functionality very similar to our
> project. And also i found many similar code piece.

Woa, quite interesting. When I last heard of sussen it was a Nessus clone
written in Gnome ('sussen' is Nessus written backwards). I do agree that it
is a piece of code very similar to what we had to develop.

> And it seems that it project write it own OVAl interpreter in C#
> with Debian support. I think this fact may change out future plans on
> writing client/server parts. Comment? Suggestions?

I've browsed the source:

- the project has an OVAL interpreter using C# (although the DPKGinfo test
does not use apt's library but parse /var/lib/dpkg/status directly) so it's
actually a rewrite of the reference interpreter.

- there is a www interface which uses a SQL backend, but it's writen in .NET.

- there is an agent but I haven't checked which communication mechanism it
  uses

- I believe the server is implement in the WWW interface (which I don't like 
  very much)

- there doesn't seem to be any mechanism (on the server side) to
  automatically update the OVAL definitions

- they have OVAL definitions for Ubuntu although I don't see how they
  generate them 

I think there's a lot that we could share or reuse. However I dislike having
a server tied to the WWW UI. I think it should be a separate entity.

Why don't you subscribe to their devel mailing list? I'll do that now.

Javier


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