Automated Implementation of Windows-related Security-Configuration Guides

TL;DR

This paper presents an automated approach using NLP to extract and implement security configurations for Windows from public guides, significantly reducing manual effort and increasing accuracy in system hardening.

Contribution

The authors develop a novel method combining NLP and Windows Administrative Templates to automatically extract and verify security rules from guides, achieving high implementation accuracy.

Findings

83% rules automatically implemented without manual effort

96% rules implemented with minimal manual effort

97% of rules correctly implemented across multiple guides

Abstract

Hardening is the process of configuring IT systems to ensure the security of the systems' components and data they process or store. The complexity of contemporary IT infrastructures, however, renders manual security hardening and maintenance a daunting task. In many organizations, security-configuration guides expressed in the SCAP (Security Content Automation Protocol) are used as a basis for hardening, but these guides by themselves provide no means for automatically implementing the required configurations. In this paper, we propose an approach to automatically extract the relevant information from publicly available security-configuration guides for Windows operating systems using natural language processing. In a second step, the extracted information is verified using the information of available settings stored in the Windows Administrative Template files, in which the majority of Windows configuration settings is defined. We show that our implementation of this approach can extract and implement 83% of the rules without any manual effort and 96% with minimal manual effort. Furthermore, we conduct a study with 12 state-of-the-art guides consisting of 2014 rules with automatic checks and show that our tooling can implement at least 97% of them correctly. We have thus significantly reduced the effort of securing systems based on existing security-configuration guides.