compliance-operator

The compliance-operator is a OpenShift Operator that allows an administrator to run compliance scans and provide remediations for the issues found. The operator leverages OpenSCAP under the hood to perform the scans.

By default, the operator runs in the openshift-compliance namespace, so make sure all namespaced resources like the deployment or the custom resources the operator consumes are created there. However, it is possible for the operator to be deployed in other namespaces as well.

The primary interface towards the Compliance Operator is the ComplianceSuite object, representing a set of scans. The ComplianceSuite can be defined either manually or with the help of ScanSetting and ScanSettingBinding objects. Note that while it is possible to use the lower-level ComplianceScan directly as well, it is not recommended.

Deploying the operator

Before you can actually use the operator, you need to make sure it is deployed in the cluster. Depending on your needs, you might want to deploy the upstream released packages or directly from the source.

First, become kubeadmin, either with oc login or by exporting KUBECONFIG.

Deploying upstream packages

Deploying from package would deploy the latest released upstream version.

First, create the CatalogSource and optionally verify it's been created successfuly:

$ oc create -f deploy/olm-catalog/catalog-source.yaml
$ oc get catalogsource -nopenshift-marketplace

Next, create the target namespace and finally either install the operator from the Web Console or from the CLI following these steps:

$ oc create -f deploy/ns.yaml
$ oc create -f deploy/olm-catalog/operator-group.yaml
$ oc create -f deploy/olm-catalog/subscription.yaml

The Subscription file can be edited to optionally deploy a custom version, see the startingCSV attribute in the deploy/olm-catalog/subscription.yaml file.

Verify that the expected objects have been created:

$ oc get sub -nopenshift-compliance
$ oc get ip -nopenshift-compliance
$ oc get csv -nopenshift-compliance

At this point, the operator should be up and running:

$ oc get deploy -nopenshift-compliance
$ oc get pods -nopenshift-compliance

Deploying from source

$ (clone repo)
$ oc create -f deploy/ns.yaml
$ oc project openshift-compliance
$ for f in $(ls -1 deploy/crds/*crd.yaml); do oc apply -f $f -n openshift-compliance; done
$ oc apply -n openshift-compliance -f deploy/

Running the operator locally

If you followed the steps above, the file called deploy/operator.yaml also creates a deployment that runs the operator. If you want to run the operator from the command line instead, delete the deployment and then run:

make run

This is mostly useful for local development.

Note on namespace removal

Many custom resources deployed with the compliance operators use finalizers to handle dependencies between objects. If the whole operator namespace gets deleted (e.g. with oc delete ns openshift-compliance), the order of deleting objects in the namespace is not guaranteed. What can happen is that the operator itself is removed before the finalizers are processed which would manifest as the namespace being stuck in the Terminating state.

It is recommended to remove all CRs and CRDs prior to removing the namespace to avoid this issue. The Makefile provides a tear-down target that does exactly that.

If the namespace is stuck, you can work around by the issue by hand-editing or patching any CRs and removing the finalizers attributes manually.

Using the operator

Before starting to use the operator, it's worth checking the descriptions of the different custom resources it introduces. These definitions are in the following document

As part of this guide, it's assumed that you have installed the compliance operator in the openshift-compliance namespace. So you can use:

# Set this to the namespace you're deploying the operator at
export NAMESPACE=openshift-compliance

There are several profiles that come out-of-the-box as part of the operator installation.

To view them, use the following command:

$ oc get -n $NAMESPACE profiles.compliance
NAME              AGE
ocp4-e8           2m50s
ocp4-moderate     2m50s
ocp4-ncp          2m50s
rhcos4-e8         2m46s
rhcos4-moderate   2m46s
rhcos4-ncp        2m46s

Profile and Node scan types

These profiles define different compliance benchmarks and as well as the scans fall into two basic categories - platform and node. The platform scans are targetting the cluster itself, in the listing above they're the ocp4-* scans, while the purpose of the node scans is to scan the actual cluster nodes. All the rhcos4-* profiles above can be used to create node scans.

Before taking one into use, we'll need to configure how the scans will run. We can do this with the ScanSetttings custom resource. The compliance-operator already ships with a default ScanSettings object that you can take into use immediately:

$ oc get -n $NAMESPACE scansettings default -o yaml
apiVersion: compliance.openshift.io/v1alpha1
kind: ScanSetting
metadata:
  name: default
  namespace: openshift-compliance
rawResultStorage:
  rotation: 3
  size: 1Gi
roles:
- worker
- master
scanTolerations:
- effect: NoSchedule
  key: node-role.kubernetes.io/master
  operator: Exists
schedule: '0 1 * * *'

So, to assert the intent of complying with the rhcos4-moderate profile, we can use the ScanSettingBinding custom resource. the example that already exists in this repo will do just this.

$ cat deploy/crds/compliance.openshift.io_v1alpha1_scansettingbinding_cr.yaml
apiVersion: compliance.openshift.io/v1alpha1
kind: ScanSettingBinding
metadata:
  name: nist-moderate
profiles:
  - name: ocp4-moderate
    kind: Profile
    apiGroup: compliance.openshift.io/v1alpha1
settingsRef:
  name: default
  kind: ScanSetting
  apiGroup: compliance.openshift.io/v1alpha1

To take it into use, do the following:

$ oc create -n $NAMESPACE -f deploy/crds/compliance.openshift.io_v1alpha1_scansettingbinding_cr.yaml
scansettingbinding.compliance.openshift.io/nist-moderate created

At this point the operator reconciles a ComplianceSuite custom resource, we can use this to track the progress of our scan.

$ oc get -n $NAMESPACE compliancesuites -w
NAME            PHASE     RESULT
nist-moderate   RUNNING   NOT-AVAILABLE

This subsequently creates the ComplianceScan objects for the suite. The ComplianceScan then creates scan pods that run on each node in the cluster. The scan pods execute openscap-chroot on every node and eventually report the results. The scan takes several minutes to complete.

If you're interested in seeing the individual pods, you can do so with:

$ oc get -n $NAMESPACE pods -w

When the scan is done, the operator changes the state of the ComplianceSuite object to "Done" and all the pods are transition to the "Completed" state. You can then check the ComplianceRemediations that were found with:

$ oc get -n $NAMESPACE complianceremediations
NAME                                                             STATE
workers-scan-auditd-name-format                                  NotApplied
workers-scan-coredump-disable-backtraces                         NotApplied
workers-scan-coredump-disable-storage                            NotApplied
workers-scan-disable-ctrlaltdel-burstaction                      NotApplied
workers-scan-disable-users-coredumps                             NotApplied
workers-scan-grub2-audit-argument                                NotApplied
workers-scan-grub2-audit-backlog-limit-argument                  NotApplied
workers-scan-grub2-page-poison-argument                          NotApplied

To apply a remediation, edit that object and set its Apply attribute to true:

$ oc edit -n $NAMESPACE complianceremediation/workers-scan-no-direct-root-logins

The operator then aggregates all applied remediations and create a MachineConfig object per scan. This MachineConfig object is rendered to a MachinePool and the MachineConfigDeamon running on nodes in that pool pushes the configuration to the nodes and reboots the nodes.

You can watch the node status with:

$ oc get nodes

Once the nodes reboot, you might want to run another Suite to ensure that the remediation that you applied previously was no longer found.

Extracting raw results

The scans provide two kinds of raw results: the full report in the ARF format and just the list of scan results in the XCCDF format. The ARF reports are, due to their large size, copied into persistent volumes:

$ oc get pv
NAME                                       CAPACITY  CLAIM
pvc-5d49c852-03a6-4bcd-838b-c7225307c4bb   1Gi       openshift-compliance/workers-scan
pvc-ef68c834-bb6e-4644-926a-8b7a4a180999   1Gi       openshift-compliance/masters-scan
$ oc get pvc
NAME                     STATUS   VOLUME                                     CAPACITY   ACCESS MODES   STORAGECLASS   AGE
ocp4-moderate            Bound    pvc-01b7bd30-0d19-4fbc-8989-bad61d9384d9   1Gi        RWO            gp2            37m
rhcos4-with-usb-master   Bound    pvc-f3f35712-6c3f-42f0-a89a-af9e6f54a0d4   1Gi        RWO            gp2            37m
rhcos4-with-usb-worker   Bound    pvc-7837e9ba-db13-40c4-8eee-a2d1beb0ada7   1Gi        RWO            gp2            37m

An example of extracting ARF results from a scan called workers-scan follows:

Once the scan had finished, you'll note that there is a PersistentVolumeClaim named after the scan:

oc get pvc/workers-scan
NAME            STATUS   VOLUME                                     CAPACITY   ACCESS MODES   STORAGECLASS   AGE
workers-scan    Bound    pvc-01b7bd30-0d19-4fbc-8989-bad61d9384d9   1Gi        RWO            gp2            38m

You'll want to start a pod that mounts the PV, for example:

apiVersion: "v1"
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: pv-extract
spec:
  containers:
    - name: pv-extract-pod
      image: registry.access.redhat.com/ubi8/ubi
      command: ["sleep", "3000"]
      volumeMounts:
        - mountPath: "/workers-scan-results"
          name: workers-scan-vol
  volumes:
    - name: workers-scan-vol
      persistentVolumeClaim:
        claimName: workers-scan

You can inspect the files by listing the /workers-scan-results directory and copy the files locally:

$ oc exec pods/pv-extract ls /workers-scan-results/0
lost+found
workers-scan-ip-10-0-129-252.ec2.internal-pod.xml.bzip2
workers-scan-ip-10-0-149-70.ec2.internal-pod.xml.bzip2
workers-scan-ip-10-0-172-30.ec2.internal-pod.xml.bzip2
$ oc cp pv-extract:/workers-scan-results .

The files are bzipped. To get the raw ARF file:

$ bunzip2 -c workers-scan-ip-10-0-129-252.ec2.internal-pod.xml.bzip2 > workers-scan-ip-10-0-129-252.ec2.internal-pod.xml

The XCCDF results are much smaller and can be stored in a configmap, from which you can extract the results. For easier filtering, the configmaps are labeled with the scan name:

$ oc get cm -l=compliance-scan=masters-scan
NAME                                            DATA   AGE
masters-scan-ip-10-0-129-248.ec2.internal-pod   1      25m
masters-scan-ip-10-0-144-54.ec2.internal-pod    1      24m
masters-scan-ip-10-0-174-253.ec2.internal-pod   1      25m

To extract the results, use:

$ oc extract cm/masters-scan-ip-10-0-174-253.ec2.internal-pod

Note that if the results are too big for the ConfigMap, they'll be bzipped and base64 encoded.

OS support

Node scans

Note that the current testing has been done in RHCOS. In the absence of RHEL/CentOS support, one can simply run OpenSCAP directly on the nodes.

Platform scans

Current testing has been done on OpenShift (OCP). The project is open to getting other platforms tested, so volunteers are needed for this.