Nist 800-53 Checklist Download
Dibe Naro
The process of becoming NIST 800-53 compliant can be lengthy. Organizations might need to develop new internal processes and establish stronger policies for securing physical assets and facilities. In addition, initiatives can require an investment in hardware or software, and existing systems might need to be reconfigured or integrated.
Compliance begins with a basic understanding of all 20 NIST 800-53 control families and their scope.
Additionally, NIST requires organizations to appoint an individual or team responsible for assessing, implementing, monitoring, and updating the controls to maintain ongoing compliance. In order to customize the controls to meet the needs of the organization, the designated implementation person or team will need a solid grasp of existing policies, standard operating procedures, and systems.
Organizations can achieve compliance across all systems and networks, as NIST 800-53 controls apply to both cloud and traditional environments.
While all organizations must meet the specified minimum requirements for compliance, those needing more robust measures can opt to implement additional controls from the NIST 800-53 catalog. A customized implementation increases security and privacy, ensures consistent application across the entire IT infrastructure, and protects against a wider variety of threats.
The following NIST audit checklist outlines the five steps to achieving compliance:
Educate all employees on security policies and train IT teams how to follow best practices for identifying and mitigating cybersecurity risks. Ensure compliance teams stay current with revisions to the NIST 800-53 framework.
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The growing popularity of NIST 800-53 is likely driven by a desire to improve data security practices in response to rising data breach costs, and when a superior data protection policy is required, the safest option is to emulate a cybersecurity framework trusted to protect federal information systems.
NIST SP 800-53 comprises 20 control families setting the baseline of data security for federal information systems. Many of these controls map to other frameworks and standards, such as the NIST Cybersecurity Framework and ISO/IEC 27001.
NIST 800-161 further expands the supply chain risk management control family of NIST 800-53. Combined, both risk management frameworks create the foundation for a Supply Chain Risk Management (SCRM) program.
NIST 800-53 specifies a security controls baseline for achieving the framework's minimum data security standard. Achieving this minimum security standard sets the foundation for complete compliance with the framework.
Designate an individual or team to take ownership of the implementation of all NIST 800-53 security controls. This responsibility should include tracking the progress of compliance efforts and ongoing alignment with the framework.
All NIST 800-53 controls must integrate with existing security frameworks and policies. The designated implementation team (see point 3) should complete an internal audit of all applicable policies and map their security requirements to each NIST 800-53 control family.
NIST Special Publication (SP) 800-53 defines the best practices for implementing secure information systems to protect sensitive data. Originally published in 2005 to assist government agencies with FISMA (Federal Information Security Modernization Act), the publication has gone through several revisions over the years, and its language today can be applied to any organization that wants to strengthen security protocols.
All government agencies are required to comply with NIST SP 800-53. Government contractors who manage federal IT networks or operate on federal IT networks will also have these compliance requirements outlined in their contracts.
Each of the 20 NIST 800-53 control families has a minimum control, also known as a baseline control. Minimum controls are used as the basic security and privacy measures that must be implemented to protect information systems.
The assessment, authorization, and monitoring control family covers evaluation planning and the delegation of team responsibilities. To effectively comply with NIST SP 800-53, organizations must clearly define who is responsible for these actions.
Nira is used by administrators of cloud applications, typically IT and Security teams. Customers include organizations of all sizes from hundreds to thousands of employees. Nira's largest customers have many millions of cloud documents that they are being collaborated on.
We developed a checklist with controls to secure user identities and their access to resources across an environment. Read on to learn about NIST SP 800-53 and use the checklist to prepare for compliance.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Special Publication 800-53 (SP 800-53) is a set of information security standards and controls for all U.S. federal IT systems except for those related to United States national security. NIST 800-53 covers the Risk Management Framework steps, including selecting a controls baseline and adapting those controls following risk assessment results. Some of the Control Families included in NIST 800-53 are access control, incident response, continuity, and disaster recovery. NIST develops and issues standards and guidelines to assist federal agencies in implementing the Federal Information Security Modernization Act of 2014 (FISMA).
Remember, this checklist is intended to help SMEs design operations and internal networks to meet NIST 800-53 compliance. The full report should be consulted when an organization moves into full compliance operations. Information security is a core business activity that requires organization-wide buy-in, on a continual basis.
Anchore has developed secure software supply chain systems that are focused precisely on solving the complexity that has evolved from these two trends. Having a robust and performant system to produce a full catalog of open source software components as well as a way to manage cloud-native deployment patterns (i.e. containers paired with CI/CD build systems) has allowed Anchore to help numerous federal agencies achieve compliance objectives like NIST 800-53. Over these engagements Anchore has developed significant expertise in how to meet the requirements of these frameworks in the least burdensome and most efficient manner.
NIST 800-53, colloquially known as the Control Catalog, is a security standard and compliance framework for all U.S. federal information systems and any enterprises that want to provide their cloud hosted services to a federal agency that stores classified data. It is tied very closely to NIST 800-37, the Risk Management Framework. Both are normally considered together and not separately. It is published by the National Institute of Standards in Technology (NIST) as a catalog of specific security controls that organizations can use to evaluate their own implementation of security controls to assess compliance with the standard. It currently has 5 revisions.
This is an important standard for both federal agencies and any cloud service providers that want to do business with federal agencies. While compliance with NIST 800-53 is not directly equivalent to FedRAMP authorization, it did heavily influence FedRAMP requirements. If you are compliant with NIST 800-53, you are well on your way to FedRAMP compliance. NIST 800-53 is both comprehensive and general enough that it is a good foundation for not only federal compliance standards like FedRAMP and continuous authority to operate (cATO) but is highly transferable to health and commercial compliance standards like HIPAA and PCI DSS.
The largest changes made in this revision was the relocation of the catalog (i.e. spreadsheet) of controls to a separate document NIST SP 800-53B and the establishment of a supply chain risk management family of controls.
Later revisions of NIST 800-53 (e.g. revision 4 & 5) update the document via a system of re-publishing the same revision with Errata for minor updates. The original three revisions updated the revision number even though the differences between the three can be thought of as iterative updates to the same general document.
You can find many NIST 800-53 compliance checklists with a quick Google Search but all of these checklists are more like cliff notes than actual checklists. This is primarily because the one-two combo of the Risk Management Framework (NIST 800-37) and the Control Catalog (NIST 800-53) are straightforward guides to achieving compliance to both standards. Take a look at the 7 primary sections of the RMF below:
The security requirements in NIST 800-171 are derived from the moderate control baseline of NIST 800-53 which makes NIST 800-171 a subset of NIST 800-53 with some modifications applied to the individual controls that effectively makes them easier to achieve. The reason for this is because these organizations only handle Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) which is not classified but still considered sensitive or private. You can think of CUI as Personally Identifiable Information (PII) with some additions like proprietary business information, law enforcement information or information that could affect national security.
ISO 27001 is more similar to NIST 800-37, the RMF, in that it is a framework and high-level guidance for managing information security in an organization. The detailed controls are laid out in ISO/IEC 27002 which accomplishes roughly the same objective as NIST 800-53.
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