CloudPassage Halo — 17 November 2014 Release

Release Notes

The 17 November 2014 Release of CloudPassage^® Halo^® includes a number of customer-requested enhancements, plus several technical fixes and improvements.

New Features and Improvements

Server-group structural changes

Server-group names sorted

The list of server groups on the Dashboard page is sorted alphanumerically by group name (except that the root group always appears at the top of the list).

Enhancements to Halo reporting

Host names now hyperlinks

The table of search results on the Reports page includes a "Hostname" column that displays either the host name or the server label of each returned server. Each host name is now a hyperlink that connects to the Server Summary page for that server.

Enhancements to the Halo REST API

System announcements now retrievable through API

The Halo REST API now includes a new API endpoint named "System Announcements". It is available to allow you to retrieve the complete history of the banner announcements displayed in the Halo portal when, for example, outages or new product releases occur.

This endpoint supports the single method "List system announcements". This is its call URL:

https://api.cloudpassage.com/v1/system_announcements/

The returned information for each announcement includes its text, the date range during which it was displayed, the start and end date/time for system outages, and other useful information.

Known Issues

The following issues are among those that remain unresolved as of this release. Any known workarounds are described.

IE8 not supported for Halo reporting. The Halo reporting service does not function for a user who has logged into Halo using Internet Explorer 8.
Workaround: Log in with a more recent version of IE or with a different browser, or use the Halo API to construct server searches.
Editing file integrity baseline expiration. If you want to change the expiration value when editing or re-baselining an existing baseline, the new expiration date is now calculated from the current date, rather than from the original baseline-creation date. However, if you keep the same setting (number of days) for the expiration value, the re-calculation does not occur and the expiration date remains based on the original creation date.
Workaround: Select a different expiration value and save the baseline. Then re-edit the baseline and specify your desired expiration value.
False-positive file integrity security events can occur in Linux systems in which the prelink utility regularly resolves links to dynamic libraries in executable files and stores the results in the executable files, thereby modifying them. This action can create differences between the servers of a scan group and the baseline (golden master) server, thereby causing the false positives.
Workarounds. Take either of the following steps:
- Manually run prelink on the baseline server before running the baseline scan. That should eliminate most or all false security events related to prelink.
- Turn off pre-linking on all of your servers.

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Halo Release Notes — 17 November 2014