Open Vulnerability and Assessment Language: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 04:11, 9 March 2025

Latest revision as of 14:59, 14 July 2025

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The repositories are collections of publicly available and open content that utilize the language.

The OVAL community has developed three schemas written in Extensible [[Markup language|Markup Language]] ([[XML]]) to serve as the framework and vocabulary of the OVAL Language. These schemas correspond to the three steps of the assessment process: an OVAL System Characteristics schema for representing system information, an OVAL Definition schema for expressing a specific machine state, and an OVAL Results schema for reporting the results of an assessment.

Content written in the OVAL Language is located in one of the many repositories found within the community. One such repository, known as the OVAL Repository, is hosted by The [[MITRE]] Corporation. It is the central meeting place for the OVAL Community to discuss, analyze, store, and disseminate OVAL Definitions. Each definition in the OVAL Repository determines whether a specified software vulnerability, configuration issue, program, or patch is present on a system.

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== OVAL Interpreter ==

The [http://oval.mitre.org/language/download/interpreter/index.html OVAL Interpreter] is a freely available [[reference implementation]] created to show how data can be collected from a computer for testing based on a set of OVAL Definitions and then evaluated to determine the results of each definition.

The OVAL Interpreter demonstrates the usability of OVAL Definitions, and can be used by definition writers to ensure correct syntax and adherence to the OVAL Language during the development of draft definitions. It is not a fully functional scanning tool and has a simplistic user interface, but running the OVAL Interpreter will provide you with a list of result values for each evaluated definition.