With the release of build.cfengine.com, I have been working to migrate some of our own security related policy into modules of their own. CFEngine Build and the cfbs tooling allows us to organize policy into modules, which are easy to update independently and share with other users. Let’s take the scenic route and look at what life is like with cfbs. One of our security policies requires that the password hashing algorithm in /etc/login.defs is set to SHA512.

Have you ever wondered how a site was designed and how the ideas were conceptualized into a webpage? If your answer is yes, you are in the right place! In this post, I will show you our journey to create our latest web page, CFEngine Build. From start to finish, how did we do the design and make the design decisions? So without further delay, let’s jump straight in!

Earlier this year, we hinted at what we were working on - a place for users to find and share reusable modules for CFEngine. Today, the CFEngine team is pleased to announce the launch of CFEngine Build: The new website, build.cfengine.com, allows you to browse for modules, and gives you information about how to use each one of them. When you’ve found the module you were looking for, it can be downloaded and built using the command line tooling.

The CFEngine engineering team has recently discovered two security issues in the CFEngine Enterprise product: While the latter one (CVE-2021-36756) only affects CFEngine Enterprise deployments using the Federated Reporting functionality, the former one (CVE-2021-38379) affects all deployments running all supported versions of CFEngine Enterprise (and many unsupported versions, 3.5 or newer, to be more precise).

When working with CFEngine, it’s common to hear advice about separating data from policy. Separating data from policy allows for separation of concerns, delegation of responsibilities and integration with other tooling. Each organization is different, and a strategy that works well in one environment may not work as well in a similar environment of another organization, so CFEngine looks to provide various generic ways to leverage external data.

CFEngine is well suited for use in IoT environments due to it’s portability, size, and performance. There already exists a meta layer for including the CFEngine community client and Masterfiles Policy Framework in Yocto Project builds.

CFEngine and Ansible are two

Manually managing groups on a large infrastructure can be a tedious task, and is therefore best suited through automation software like CFEngine. Unfortunately - at time of writing - CFEngine does not have any built-in promise types for managing groups. But fear not; in CFEngine 3.17, custom promise types were introduced.