Chapter 1. Overview of the Insights for RHEL vulnerability service
The vulnerability service enables quick assessment and comprehensive monitoring of the exposure of your RHEL infrastructure to Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) so you can better understand your most critical issues and systems and effectively manage remediations.
With your data uploaded to the vulnerability service, you can filter and sort groups of systems and CVEs to refine and optimize your views. You can also add context to individual CVEs when they pose an extraordinary risk to systems. After gaining an understanding of your risk exposure, report on the status of the CVEs to appropriate stakeholders, then create Ansible Playbooks to remediate issues to secure your organization.
Prerequisites
The vulnerability service is available for all supported versions of RHEL 6, 7, 8 and 9. The following conditions must be met before you can use the vulnerability service:
- Each system has the Insights client installed and registered to the Insights for Red Hat Enterprise Linux application. Follow the Red Hat Insights for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Get Started instructions to install the client and register your system(s).
- The vulnerability service is fully supported for RHEL systems managed by Red Hat Subscription Management (RHSM) and Satellite 6 and later. Using any other means to obtain package updates, other than Satellite 6 with RHSM or RHSM registered with subscription.redhat.com (Customer Portal), can lead to misleading results.
- Vulnerability service remediations are not fully supported and may not work properly on Satellite 5 and Spacewalk-hosted RHEL systems.
- Some features require special privileges provided by your organization administrator. Specifically, the ability to view Red Hat Security Advisories (RHSAs) associated with certain CVEs and systems, and to view and patch those vulnerabilities in the Red Hat Insights for Red Hat Enterprise Linux patch service, requires permissions granted through user access.
Additional resources
1.1. How the vulnerability service works
The vulnerability service uses the Insights client to gather information about your RHEL systems. The client gathers information about the systems and uploads it to the vulnerability service.
The vulnerability service then assesses the data against the Red Hat CVE database and security bulletins to determine if there are any outstanding CVEs that could affect the systems, and provides the results of those comparisons.
Once the data has been analyzed, you can view and sort the displayed results, assess the risks and priorities of the vulnerabilities, report their status, and create and deploy Ansible Playbooks to remediate them. The goal of the vulnerability service is to enable a repeatable process that protects against security weaknesses in your RHEL infrastructure.
1.2. User Access settings in the Red Hat Hybrid Cloud Console
All users on your account have access to most of the data in Insights for Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
1.2.1. Predefined User Access groups and roles
To make groups and roles easier to manage, Red Hat provides two predefined groups and a set of predefined roles.
1.2.1.1. Predefined groups
The Default access group contains all users in your organization. Many predefined roles are assigned to this group. It is automatically updated by Red Hat.
If the Organization Administrator makes changes to the Default access group its name changes to Custom default access group and it is no longer updated by Red Hat.
The Default admin access group contains only users who have Organization Administrator permissions. This group is automatically maintained and users and roles in this group cannot be changed.
1.2.2. User Access roles for vulnerability-service users
The following roles enable standard or enhanced access to vulnerability service features in Insights for Red Hat Enterprise Linux:
- Vulnerability viewer. Read any vulnerability-service resource.
- Vulnerability administrator. Perform any available operation against any vulnerability-service resource.
