Intro the Cloud Native Security Controls Catalog

The CNCF Security Technical Advisory Group (“Security TAG”) has provided a wealth of information to assist organizations in the planning and design of secure cloud native systems, including the Cloud Native Security Whitepaper (CNSWP) and the Software Supply Chain Best Practices Paper (SSCP). Organizations would like to self-assess their company’s alignment with these materials in a clear, concrete way, such as via checklists or automation.

In response, we’ve developed the Cloud Native Security Controls Catalog (“Controls Catalog”), and today we are announcing completion of the first phase of this project, which provides a discrete list of the recommendations referenced in those whitepapers, with additional implementation information and a best-effort mapping of these controls to NIST SP800-53r5. This effort is designed to complement and leverage, but not replace, existing industry accepted frameworks and assessment language.

The anticipated audience for this catalog are members of DevSecOps, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), and Platform teams, as well as Auditors, Regulators, and Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) team members.

How to use the Cloud Native Security Controls Catalog

We understand that systems are engineered by understanding the context of an initiative and considering what requirements are known at the time, and then those systems are continuously improved over time. Often, the definition of a secure cloud native system is unclear, and engineers seek out specific acceptance criteria which can be applied to the components of their systems. By developing the Controls Catalog, we hope to be able to add clarity to these conversations, allowing any decisions to include or exclude certain controls to be intentional and explicit.

Similarly, Auditors, Regulators, and GRC team members may be interested in assessing an environment against the Controls Catalog to identify adherence, or as a proxy for identifying the overall security controls maturity of an environment. This is not expected to be a complete solution to identifying whether an environment’s security posture is sufficient, and requires that users of the catalog continue to consider broader requirements based on their company policy, contractual obligations, and applicable regulations.

The Controls Catalog has a unique identifier for each control in the form of a monotonically increasing ID number. As the project matures this ID is subject to change, but in the interim it provides an efficient method to identify a unique control. That control originated in an upstream document, which is documented in the “Originating Document” column as either the CNSWP v1.0 or the SSCP v1.0, and we have also attempted to identify which section of that document the control can be found in, via the “Section” column. Next, we have the “Control Title” and “Control Implementation” columns, which provide a brief summary of the control, and some best-effort implementation guidance. The final three columns provide some other context, such as references to related NIST SP800-53r5 controls, or the Assurance Level and Risk Categories as identified in the upstream documents (where applicable).

We acknowledge that manually performing audits or reviewing checklists is non-optimal in a fast-moving environment. That is why we are also kicking off the next phase of this initiative, where the Controls Catalog will be converted to a machine-readable format that aligns with NIST Open Security Controls Assessment Language (OSCAL). We also plan to perform additional mappings to existing frameworks, such as NIST’s Secure Software Development Framework (SSDF) NIST 800-218, with future goals to map to additional such as the Cloud Security Alliance’s Cloud Controls Matrix (CCM), contractual obligations or security frameworks such as ISO® 27001, SOC 2®, PCI DSS, FedRAMP℠, HITRUST®, and CMMC, or even regulations such as GDPR, HIPAA, and Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX).

If you’re interested in this work and would like to provide feedback on what we’ve done so far, or would like to get interested, please reach out to the team on GitHub , or join the #tag-security-controls channel in the CNCF slack !