Nova plugins are designed specifically for auditing the compliance and security level of an existing system. These plugins are designed to alow an administrator to run security checks or even groups of security checks within their SaltStack installation. This allows for real-time insight into the compliance level of running systems.
Place hubble.py in your _modules/
directory in your Salt
fileserver (whether roots or gitfs) and sync it to the minion.
Create a hubblestack_nova
directory in the root of your Salt fileserver's
base
environment. Inside of this directory, create a directory tree to
organize your audit modules. Place any desired audit modules into this
directory tree, along with any supporting files (yaml files, etc). Nova audits
are targeted via this directory structure, with an optional filter on tags
The directory/environment in which nova searches for audit modules are configurable via pillar. The defaults are shown below:
hubblestack.nova.dir: salt://hubblestack_nova
hubblestack.nova.saltenv: base
There are three functions in the hubble.py module. hubble.sync
will sync the
configured hubblestack_nova/
directory to the minion. hubble.load
will
load the synced audit modules and their yaml configuration files. Finally,
hubble.audit
will run the audits.
By default, hubble.audit
will call hubble.load
(which in turn calls
hubble.sync
) (in order to ensure that it is auditing with the most up-to-date
information. These operations are fairly fast, but if you want to avoid the
additional overhead, you can disable these behaviors via pillar (defaults are
shown, change to False to disable behaviors):
hubblestack.nova.autosync: True
hubblestack.nova.autoload: True
hubble.audit
takes two optional arguments. The first is a comma-separated
list of paths. These paths can be files or directories. If a path is a
directory, all modules below that directory will be run. If it is a file, that
file will be run.
The second argument is a glob pattern, against which audit tags will be
matched. All audits have an accompanying tag. Nova modules are designed to take
this argument, compare it to each tag that module handles, and only run those
which match the argument (using fnmatch
).
hubble.audit
will return a list of audits which were successful, and a list
of audits which failed.
Here are some example calls:
# Run all yaml configs and tags under salt://hubblestack_nova/
salt '*' hubble.audit
# Run all yaml configs and tags under salt://hubblestack_nova/foo/
# Will also run salt://hubblestack_nova/foo.yaml if it exists
salt '*' hubble.audit modules=foo
# Run all yaml configs and tags under salt://hubblestack_nova/foo/ and
# salt://hubblestack_nova/bar, but only run audits with tags starting
# with "CIS"
salt '*' hubble.audit modules=foo,bar tags='CIS*'
If you're interested in contributing to this project this section outlines the structure and requirements for Nova audit module development.
# -*- encoding: utf-8 -*-
'''
Loader and primary interface for nova modules
:maintainer: HubbleStack
:maturity: 20160214
:platform: Linux
:requires: SaltStack
'''
from __future__ import absolute_import
import logging
All Nova plugins should include the above header, expanding the docstring to include full documentation
import fnmatch
import salt.utils
def __virtual__():
if salt.utils.is_windows():
return False, 'This audit module only runs on linux'
return True
def audit(data_list, tag, verbose=False):
__tags__ = []
for data in data_list:
# This is where you process the dictionaries passed in by hubble.py,
# searching for data pertaining to this audit module. Modules which
# require no data should use yaml which is empty except for a
# top-level key, and should only do work if the top-level key is
# found in the data
pass
ret = {'Success': [], 'Failure': []}
for tag in __tags__:
if fnmatch.fnmatch(tag, tags):
# We should run this tag
# <do audit stuff here>
ret['Success'].append(tag)
return ret
All Nova plugins require a __virtual__()
function to determine module
compatibility, and an audit()
function to perform the actual audit
functionality
The audit()
function must take three arguments, data_list
, tag
and
verbose
. The data_list
argument is a list of dictionaries passed in by
hubble.py
. hubble.py
gets this data from loading the specified yaml for
the audit run. Your audit module should only run if it finds its own data in
this list. The tag
argument is a glob expression for which tags the audit
function should run. It is the job of the audit module to compare the tag
glob with all tags supported by this module and only run the audits which
match. The verbose
argument defines whether additional information should
be returned for audits, such as description and remediation instructions.
The return value should be a dictionary, with two keys, "Success" and
"Failure". The values for these keys should be a list of tags as strings, or a
list of dictionaries containing tags and other information for the audit (in
the case of verbose
).