Compliance Auditing & Vulnerability Assessment in One Tool: Paws Studio

For the first time, Paws Studio, Titania’s powerful compliance auditing tool, will now include vulnerability assessments as well as compliance. This enhancement is the first step towards delivering a more holistic solution for auditors of workstations and servers, just as Titania’s flagship product Nipper Studio has for auditor of firewalls, switches and routers.

Titania is pleased to announce the introduction of OVAL (Open Vulnerability Assessment Language) compliance and vulnerability assessment to Paws Studio, the compliance auditing tool for workstations and servers. The latest release will complement existent policies such as: PCI DSS, SANS, NERC CIP 007-4, NSA and DISA STIG, in order to provide an even more comprehensive view for auditors.

OVAL is supported by the Department of Homeland Security as well as other U.S. governmental agencies and it is a risk and compliance management solution, extensively used by the IT industry. The OVAL compliance framework supports 560+ checks, depending on the operating system, with further check support to be added in the future. The OVAL vulnerability directory carries out 70+ checks, subject to the operating system. Due to frequent updates applied to OVAL, Paws Studio will facilitate the updating process through a convenient Policy Converter which can be found in the ‘Utilities’ tab. The Policy Converter allows the user to download the latest updates from the OVAL website, save it and then upload it to Paws Studio. The Titania Technical Team will also update OVAL on a regular basis within Paws Studio.

Additional improvements to the software include enhancing the Registry Checks to be case sensitive or insensitive, which will minimise the risk of false reporting. Registry values can now be evaluated against regular expressions. Also for a more accurate view, Paws Studio now allows checks for “<=” and “>=” in conjunction with the already present “<” and “>”.

For the Technical Team to offer the best support possible to customers, Paws Studio now offers an easy logging option which can be accessed through GUI, under ‘Settings’, by checking the box for ‘Enable logging’. This option enables the support team to extract a log with useful information for supplying specific and time-efficient assistance.

Overall, the team has also performed general maintenance work to consolidate Paws Studio to an even more robust structure and improved user experience. Titania cares about customers’ suggestions and endeavours to add new features to its products, according to users’ feedback. If you have any suggestions or questions about Paws Studio, please contact the Titania team at support@titania.com

[Note this release is for Windows, Ubuntu 12.04, Open Suse 12.3 and Fedora 19 platforms with releases for CentOS, Open Suse 13.1 and Ubuntu 13.10 to follow.]

Nipper Studio 2.3 Now Released

Update now or download a free 30 day evaluation and benefit from the new enhancements such as PCI DSS 3 auditing, software vulnerability analysis, full Unicode support and more…

NipperStudio 2.3 is now available and contains both new features and advancements to the underlying audit technology, providing updates that will benefit all users.

Existing Users: Next time you run Nipper Studio and perform a software update check you will be prompted to download the new version. The latest version can also be manually downloaded by logging on to your Titania account.

New Users: Log on to your Titania account and download the latest version from the Titania web site.

New and Improved Features in Nipper Studio 2.3

·         PCI DSS 3 reporting, using the latest version of the PCI DSS compliance standards. To help make the PCI DSS process simpler, interactive options are available to step the auditor through the process of checking any non-automated elements (e.g. is the documentation up to date?)

·         Vastly improved software vulnerability analysis with the inclusion of the NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) NVD (National Vulnerability Database). Plus integration of the vulnerability analysis with OVAL (Open Vulnerability and Assessment Language) templates.

·         STIG improvements with better reporting of findings, the collating of results, better interactive options and more automation of some findings.

·         Improved selection of date formatting including the addition of ISO 8601 date formats.

·         Improved HTML reporting with support for themes using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). The old reporting theme is also included as the “Classic” theme.

·         Vastly enhanced remote connectivity capabilities using XML-based definitions, enabling the easy expansion of the capability by both users and Titania. Additionally, remote connectivity is now also available from the command line.

·         A new resource manager to enable the ease of updating the resources such as NVD, STIG and OVAL templates. So if a new STIG is released, or an internal version is maintained, then it can easily be imported in to Nipper Studio for immediate use.

·         Improvements with extended characters within device configurations and reports with the full adoption of Unicode throughout.

If you have any questions or would like more information about any of the new  or existing features in Nipper Studio then please don’t hesitate to get in touch.