Rocky Linux 9 Essential Eight Hardened

Overview

Rocky Linux is a community enterprise operating system produced by the Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation, built to be binary compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9. This edition applies the SCAP Security Guide's Australian Cyber Security Centre Essential Eight profile at build time, using the same open source oscap engine and the same freely available policy content a customer would run themselves, then re-evaluates the machine cleanly after a reboot so the score reflects what the machine actually boots into.

The scanner, the policy content and the machine readable evidence all ship on the image: an ARF results file, a rendered HTML report, the achieved score and a manifest recording the datastream, its checksum, the profile identifier, the content package version, the scanner version and the exact list of excluded rules. You can re-run the identical evaluation yourself with one command and compare.

This is a hardened image that ships its own evaluation. It is not a certification, an accreditation or a compliance guarantee: compliance with the Essential Eight is an organisational determination about a whole environment, which no machine image can confer.

Common uses

• Starting a regulated or security reviewed project from a measured baseline rather than an assumed one
• Producing machine readable evidence of a host's hardening posture for an internal audit
• Detecting configuration drift on long lived servers with a scheduled, audit only re evaluation