Cert Manager

Cert Manager is a security scanning and hardening tool that provides vulnerability scanning, security audits, compliance checklists, encryption helpers, password generation, and alerting — all from the terminal.

Commands

How It Works

Cert Manager dispatches commands through a case statement. Each security operation prints results to stdout and appends a timestamped entry to history.log for full audit trail.

Key features:

• scan — Checks for known vulnerabilities in the current environment
• audit — Runs through a comprehensive security audit checklist
• harden — Provides a step-by-step guide: Step 1 (Update system) → Step 2 (Configure firewall) → Step 3 (Strengthen authentication)
• hash — Uses sha256sum to compute a cryptographic hash of any input string
• password — Generates a 16-character random password using Python's random module (letters, digits, and !@# symbols)
• compliance — Outputs a checklist covering access controls, encryption, and logging

Data Storage

All data is stored locally in ~/.local/share/cert-manager/ by default:

• history.log — Timestamped audit trail of every command executed
• data.log — General data storage

Override the storage location by setting the CERT_MANAGER_DIR environment variable:

export CERT_MANAGER_DIR="$HOME/security-data/cert-manager"

Alternatively, XDG_DATA_HOME is respected if CERT_MANAGER_DIR is not set.

Requirements

• bash 4+ (uses set -euo pipefail for strict mode)
• python3 (standard library only — used for password generation)
• Standard Unix tools (sha256sum, date, echo)
• No API keys needed

When to Use

1. Quick vulnerability scanning — Run cert-manager scan to check your system for known security issues before deploying
2. Security audits and compliance — Use cert-manager audit and cert-manager compliance to walk through security checklists for SOC2, ISO 27001, or internal policies
3. System hardening — Run cert-manager harden to get a step-by-step guide for updating, firewall configuration, and authentication hardening
4. Generating secure passwords — Use cert-manager password to create strong random passwords for new accounts or services
5. Hashing sensitive data — Run cert-manager hash <input> to quickly compute SHA-256 checksums for integrity verification or data comparison

Examples

# Run a full vulnerability scan
cert-manager scan

# Execute a security audit
cert-manager audit

# Quick check on a specific service
cert-manager check nginx

# Generate a security report
cert-manager report

# Get hardening recommendations
cert-manager harden

# Generate a secure password
cert-manager password

# Hash a string (SHA-256)
cert-manager hash "my-secret-data"

# Check compliance status
cert-manager compliance

# Encrypt data
cert-manager encrypt "sensitive-config-value"

# Check for active security alerts
cert-manager alerts

# Show version
cert-manager version

# Show all commands
cert-manager help

Output

All command output goes to stdout. The history log is always written to $DATA_DIR/history.log. Redirect output as needed:

cert-manager report > security-report.txt
cert-manager scan > scan-results.txt

Configuration

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