[Open-scap] OpenSCAP 0.8.5 Issue - xccdf_benchmark_get_item return value

[Francisco Slavin]

Hello,

We have recently begun testing SecState with the latest OpenSCAP build (0.8.5) to pull in bug fixes.  We have found an issue which seems to break our XCCDF profile selection & manipulation handling.  I have included an example script which demonstrates the issue.

The error our team is seeing regarding profile selection appears to be caused by the xccdf_benchmark_get_item function.  We are seeing the xccdf_benchmark_get_item function return "NULL" both when the specified item exists and when the item does not exist.

According to the API Docs: http://open-scap.et.redhat.com/doc/group__XCCDF.html#ga92afdc66eed4d0c691327da277e9766b
It looks like the xccdf_benchmark_get_item function is supposed to return an item if the specified item exists, or 'NULL' if it fails to find an item.  In 0.8.0, this was the behavior we saw; we based our profile manipulation & error handling around this behavior accordingly.  It appears that in 0.8.5 this function no longer behaves as documented.

I hope you guys can point me in the right direction for a resolution on this.  Has the function call been updated, and is our usage now out of date?  Or is this a bug?

Thank you
- Francisco Slavin

Below is a short code example Yulian Khodorkovskiy put together to demonstrate & reproduce the issue.
On a system with OpenSCAP 0.8.0, run on SCAP Security Guide content, this script succeeds and prints "Successfully imported".
On a system with OpenSCAP 0.8.5, run on the same SSG content, this script fails and prints "Import failed: profile test does not exist".
Note that a profiles named 'test' does exist in the SSG content we are using.

---
#!/usr/bin/env python
import openscap_api as oscap
import sys

def test(benchmark_file):
    try:
        benchmark = oscap.xccdf.benchmark_import(benchmark_file)
        if benchmark == None:
            print "Error importing benchmark %s" % benchmark_file
            return

        test_profile = 'test'

        prof_item = benchmark.get_item(test_profile)
        if prof_item == None:
            print "Import failed: profile %s does not exist" % test_profile
            return
        else:
            print "Successfully imported"

    except TypeError:
        print "\nThe file %s passed in is not an xccdf benchmark file." % sys.argv[1]
        print "Please provide the path to an xccdf benchmark file"
        return

if len(sys.argv) == 2:
    test(sys.argv[1])
else:
    print "Please provide a path to a xccdf benchmark xml file"
    print "usage: ./test.py <path to xccdf benchmark xml file>"

---