CIS Benchmark Converter

Author: Octomany
LinkedIn: LinkedIn

Date Created: 2024-11-06
Last Update: 2025-14-03

Description

CIS Benchmark Converter is a Python script that extracts recommendations from CIS Benchmark PDF documents and exports them into CSV, Excel, or JSON formats. The script converts unstructured PDF content into a structured table, simplifying compliance reviews and audits.

Features

• Configurable Extraction:
  Set the start page to skip tables of contents or disclaimers, and adjust the logging level via command-line options.

• Multiple Output Formats:
  Export the extracted data as CSV (using a pipe | delimiter), Excel (with styled headers, dropdowns, and conditional formatting), or JSON for easy data integration.

• Robust and Maintainable:
  Uses pathlib for modern file path management, extended type annotations for static type checking, enhanced exception handling, and a progress bar (via tqdm) for user feedback.

Installation

1. Clone this repository.

2. Install dependencies using the provided requirements.txt:

   pip install -r requirements.txt

   requirements.txt:

   pdfplumber
   openpyxl
   tqdm
   

Usage

Run the script from the command line as follows:

python cis_benchmark_converter.py \
  -i path/to/input_file.pdf \
  -o path/to/output_file \
  -f [csv|excel|json] \
  --start_page 10 \
  --log_level INFO

Arguments

• -i, --input : Path to the input CIS Benchmark PDF file (required).
• -o, --output : Path to the output file (defaults to the input file name with a .csv, .xlsx, or .json extension).
• -f, --format : Output file format: csv, excel, or json (default: excel).
• --start_page : Page number to start extraction (default: 10).
• --log_level : Logging level (DEBUG, INFO, WARNING, or ERROR; default: INFO).

Example

python cis_benchmark_converter.py -i ./CIS_AWS_Benchmark.pdf -o ./CIS_AWS_Benchmark.json -f json --start_page 10 --log_level INFO

For JSON output, the data is structured as a list of dictionaries, with each dictionary representing a recommendation and its associated sections.

Note: The script automatically excludes any sections labeled "CIS Controls" to focus solely on the core recommendations.

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to Flavien Fouqueray (UnBonWhisky) for his valuable bug fixes and contributions in earlier versions of this script.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License. Please respect the copyrights of the CIS Benchmark documents when using and sharing this tool.