DISA’s final release of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7 Security Technical Implementation Guide (STIG) came out a few weeks ago and it has plenty of improvements and changes. The openstack-ansible-security role has already been updated with these changes.

Quite a few duplicated STIG controls were removed and a few new ones were added. Some of the controls in the pre-release were difficult to implement, especially those that changed parameters for PKI-based authentication.

The biggest challenge overall was the renumbering. The pre-release STIG used an unusual numbering convention: RHEL-07-123456. The final version used the more standardized “V” numbers, such as V-72225. This change required a substantial patch to bring the Ansible role inline with the new STIG release.

All of the role’s documentation is now updated to reflect the new numbering scheme and STIG changes. The key thing to remember is that you’ll need to use --skip-tag with the new STIG numbers if you need to skip certain tasks.

Note: These changes won’t be backported to the stable/ocata branch, so you need to use the master branch to get these changes.

Have feedback? Found a bug? Let us know!