Automated implementation of windows-related security-configuration guides

Hardening is the process of configuring IT systems to ensure the security of\nthe systems' components and data they process or store. The complexity of\ncontemporary IT infrastructures, however, renders manual security hardening and\nmaintenance a daunting task.\n In many organizations, security-configuration guides expressed in the SCAP\n(Security Content Automation Protocol) are used as a basis for hardening, but\nthese guides by themselves provide no means for automatically implementing the\nrequired configurations.\n In this paper, we propose an approach to automatically extract the relevant\ninformation from publicly available security-configuration guides for Windows\noperating systems using natural language processing. In a second step, the\nextracted information is verified using the information of available settings\nstored in the Windows Administrative Template files, in which the majority of\nWindows configuration settings is defined.\n We show that our implementation of this approach can extract and implement\n83% of the rules without any manual effort and 96% with minimal manual effort.\nFurthermore, we conduct a study with 12 state-of-the-art guides consisting of\n2014 rules with automatic checks and show that our tooling can implement at\nleast 97% of them correctly. We have thus significantly reduced the effort of\nsecuring systems based on existing security-configuration guides.\n