What it is

OpenSCAP is a NIST Certified SCAP 1.2 toolkit for security compliance work in the SCAP ecosystem. It centers on the oscap command line tool, which lets users load, scan, validate, edit, and export SCAP documents. The project covers compliance, CPE, data streams, OVAL, scanning, and XCCDF, so it can serve as a core tool for checking systems against machine-readable security benchmarks.

The concrete problem it solves is the need to evaluate compliance content without relying only on manual review. Organizations often have OVAL definitions, XCCDF benchmarks, CPE dictionaries, and data stream collections, and they need a way to validate those documents, run scans, and generate usable outputs. OpenSCAP addresses that workflow by providing commands for data stream validation, OVAL evaluation, XCCDF profile evaluation, guide generation, and report generation.

Key capabilities

• The oscap command line tool can load, scan, validate, edit, and export SCAP documents.
• It can validate a SCAP source data stream and all components inside it, including XCCDF, OVAL, OCIL, and CPE.
• It can evaluate all definitions in an OVAL definition file and write OVAL results to an XML file.
• It can evaluate OVAL definitions that are part of a particular data stream within a SCAP data stream collection.
• It can evaluate a selected profile from an XCCDF document while using a CPE dictionary.
• It can generate an XCCDF guide with or without profile selection and can generate a report from XCCDF scan results.

Who uses it and how

• Teams that maintain SCAP content use it to validate source data streams before using them in a scanning workflow.
• Security operators use it to evaluate OVAL definitions directly and store the results as an OVAL result file.
• Users who need benchmark-based checks use it to evaluate a specific XCCDF profile, such as the Desktop profile, against a system.
• Documentation and reporting workflows use it to turn XCCDF content into a human-readable guide and to turn scan results into a report.
• Contributors use the project through the User Manual, Developer Manual, contribution guide, mailing list, and libera.chat IRC channel.

Getting started

The README directs users to the oscap command line tool for validation, scanning, and document generation, and it points to the OpenSCAP Developer Manual for compilation, testing, and debugging. No package manager, container image, or hosted deployment option is given in the supplied README excerpt.

When to use it — and when not to

OpenSCAP is a good fit when a team needs an open-source, command-line toolkit for NIST Certified SCAP 1.2 documents and wants to inspect, scan, and report on XCCDF, OVAL, CPE, and data stream content. It is less suitable for users who need a managed service, a graphical product, or Microsoft Windows support, because the README states that Windows support is officially void as of February 1, 2022 and mentions no hosted option. The supplied facts also show a low-level workflow, so teams must operate the tool through commands and result files rather than relying on a finished compliance platform.

oscap ds sds-validate scap-ds.xml

oscap oval eval --results oval-results.xml scap-oval.xml

oscap oval eval --datastream-id ds.xml --oval-id xccdf.xml --results oval-results.xml scap-ds.xml

oscap xccdf eval --profile Desktop --results xccdf-results.xml --cpe cpe-dictionary.xml scap-xccdf.xml

oscap xccdf eval --datastream-id ds.xml --xccdf-id xccdf.xml --results xccdf-results.xml scap-ds.xml

oscap xccdf generate guide XCCDF-FILE > XCCDF-GUIDE-FILE

oscap xccdf generate guide --profile PROFILE XCCDF-FILE > XCCDF-GUIDE-FILE

oscap xccdf generate report XCCDF-RESULT-FILE > XCCDF-REPORT-FILE