Author: Vincent Danen vdanen@redhat.com
This tool was initially written internally for the Red Hat Product Security team for the purposes of managing and validating CPEs within our products. As such it is a little Red Hat-centric, but should be usable for any other non-Red Hat project.
It requires the wonderful CPE python module from https://pypi.python.org/pypi/cpe/.
To describe the usage of CPE within Red Hat and for Red Hat products.
Red Hat currently uses CPE 2.2, so this tool is more focused on that although it will work with 2.3 as well.
Part can be one of: a (Application), h (Hardware), or o (Operating System)
Vendor is the supplier name and should be an abridged version of the primary DNS hostname (e.g. 'redhat.com' becomes 'redhat' or 'oxford.ac.uk' becomes 'oxford')
Product is a short and recognizable name of the product, where no such short recognition exists it should be the full name of the product with spaces underscored (e.g. 'red_hat_enterprise_linux' would be used if 'rhel' were not recognized as the same)
Version is the version of the project and should be represented in the same way as the product (e.g. 'Foo 1-1' would use '1-1' or 'Bar 1.1-p3' would be '1.1-p3'. There is no way in CPE to note major and minor versions so you can opt to use this field for the major (e.g. '1') and the Update field for the minor
Update is used for update or service pack information, and may be referred to as a point or minor version. In the case of a version "0" you can use the vendor term for initial release (e.g. you could use '0' to refer to RHEL 7.0 or 'ga' in the case of RHEL 7 GA). If there is no commonly used term for the initial release, then '-' should be used for that CPE (e.g. "Foo 1" would be "foo:1:-:" unless it was referred to as "Foo 1.0" in which case "foo:1:0:" may be more appropriate)
Edition is used for the the edition of this platform, e.g. "workstation" or "server" or "professional", etc. NOTE: This is available for legacy CPE 2.2 compatability but is considered deprecated in 2.3
Language is used for the language used for this product (e.g. "zh-tw" for traditional Chinese)
Software Edition is used to characterise how the product is tailored for a particular maket or class of end users
Target Software is used to indicate the software environment within which the product operates
Target Hardware is used to indicate the architecture on whioch the product operates (e.g. "x86" or "x86_64")
Other is used to capture any other general descriptive or identifying infomration which is vendor- or product-specific
CPEs should be validated before they are used in public and perhaps included in the global CPE dictionary. It can be difficult to change CPE names once they are out in the wild.
The cpe-manager.py script can be used to validate the CPE:
$ ./cpe-manager.py -d -c cpe:/a:redhat:openstack-installer:6::el7