Learn: where a rule comes from
The ladder gives you the four words — standard, baseline, control, setting. This page answers the next question: who wrote the rulebook, and under whose authority. Every control on this site arrived by the same route. A law obliges somebody to act; a policy says what acting looks like; a framework structures the work; a catalogue holds the controls; a baseline picks the ones your kind of system gets; a setting is how one of them is enforced on a real device; and a check proves it was. Each step below names its publishers, with the address their own words live at and what it takes to read them.
The chain, in one picture
- Law and contract what obliges anyone to do this at all
- Policy what the government or agency directs, under that law
- Framework how the work is structured: categorise, select, assess, authorise
- Control catalogue the controls themselves, written once for everyone
- Baseline the controls chosen for one kind of system
- Configuration setting how a control is enforced on a real device
- Check and evidence how conformance is expressed, measured and proved
Nothing is obliged to use the whole chain. A private business usually joins at the framework or the setting and has no policy rung at all; a DoD system has every rung and a second committee besides. That is what "normalised" means in practice, and the three traces below walk it.
Who publishes what, and for whom
The rows are the steps of the chain; the columns are who the publisher writes for. Reading across one row answers the question this page exists for: the same job, as NIST, DISA, NASA, CIS and the ACSC each answer it.
The same control, traced three ways
One control — a device that locks itself after a period of inactivity — carried down three different ladders. The control barely changes. Everything above and below it does.
A federal civilian system
The plain FISMA chain: obliged by statute, categorised, baselined, enforced, assessed.
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Law and contract FISMA 2014
The agency must run an information security programme, and NIST's standards are mandatory for this system.
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Policy OMB Circular A-130
OMB tells the agency what that programme looks like and binds it to the NIST framework.
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Framework FIPS 199 and FIPS 200
The system is categorised moderate for confidentiality, integrity and availability.
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Control catalogue NIST SP 800-53
AC-11 Device Lock: prevent further access by initiating a device lock after a period of inactivity.
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Baseline NIST SP 800-53B
The moderate baseline includes AC-11, and the agency's parameter sets the period at 15 minutes.
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Configuration setting macOS Security Compliance Project
On macOS: a screensaver idle time of 900 seconds, with the lock delay at zero, in a configuration profile.
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Check and evidence NIST SP 800-53A
The assessor examines the profile and tests a machine; the result goes in the assessment that supports the authorisation.
A DoD system
The same control, a different committee, and a rule concrete enough to run.
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Law and contract FISMA 2014
FISMA applies, and for a national security system CNSS policy applies instead of the civilian line.
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Policy DoDI 8500.01 and 8510.01
DoD adopts the RMF and puts DISA's content in force: the STIG is policy, not advice.
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Framework NIST SP 800-37 (RMF)
Categorise, select, implement, assess, authorise, monitor — with an authorising official who signs.
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Control catalogue CNSSI 1253
The 800-53 catalogue with the national security baselines and overlays applied, so the selected set differs from the civilian one.
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Baseline DISA Security Requirements Guides
The Operating System SRG: the OS must initiate a session lock after a period of inactivity.
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Configuration setting DISA STIGs
A named rule for this exact Windows release, CAT II, with check text and fix text — the registry value, and the command to set it.
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Check and evidence Control Correlation Identifiers
The rule cites a CCI, the CCI points back at AC-11, and a scanner's XCCDF result rolls the finding up to the control.
A private business
Nothing here is obliged by FISMA. It arrives by contract, by market, or by choice.
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Law and contract DFARS 252.204-7012
A defense contract flows SP 800-171 down — or no contract does, and everything below is voluntary.
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Policy nobody
There is no rung here. No OMB circular reaches a private company; its own policy is the only policy.
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Framework NIST CSF 2.0
CSF 2.0 organises the work by function, or CIS Controls prioritises it, or ISO 27001 certifies it — whichever the customer asks for.
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Control catalogue NIST SP 800-171
3.1.10: use session lock with pattern-hiding displays to prevent access after a period of inactivity.
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Baseline CIS Benchmarks
The CIS Benchmark for the platform, Level 1 for a workstation, Level 2 where the data warrants it.
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Configuration setting Microsoft security baselines
The vendor's own baseline sets the machine inactivity limit, imported as a GPO or an Intune policy.
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Check and evidence CMMC
A CMMC assessment, a customer's questionnaire, or an ISO audit — somebody outside the company asks for the evidence.
How they are normalised
Four mechanisms do nearly all the work of turning one body's rules into another's, and each one is public.
- Control Correlation Identifiers — DISA breaks each NIST SP 800-53 control statement into single testable assertions and numbers them. A STIG rule cites the CCI, the CCI names the control, and a pile of findings about registry values becomes an answer about controls. This is the one joint that makes a DoD scan report legible to a civilian assessor.
- OSCAL — a catalogue, a profile and a baseline as data rather than prose. A baseline becomes a document that says "this catalogue, these controls, these parameters", which a program resolves. It is how this instance reads 800-53 and 800-171 at all.
- SCAP and the National Checklist Program — XCCDF for the checklist, OVAL for the test, and the National Checklist Program as the public shelf. The same STIG exists twice: as prose for a person and as content for a scanner.
- macOS Security Compliance Project — the worked example. Each macOS rule carries its references to 800-53, 800-171, the STIG, CIS and CMMC at once, and the build emits whichever baseline you asked for. One rule, many citations: that is normalisation done at the source instead of afterwards.
And the two paths into private business
Nothing on this page obliges a company by itself. Federal rules reach private business two ways. By contract: DFARS 252.204-7012 flows NIST SP 800-171 down to every defense supplier, and CMMC audits it; FAR 52.204-21 sets a fifteen-requirement floor in almost every other federal contract. By market: FedRAMP baselines is met once and sold to every agency. Everything else — NIST CSF 2.0, CIS Critical Security Controls, ISO/IEC 27001 and 27002 — is adopted because a customer asked or because it is a good idea, and a company can leave at any time. Which of those applies to you is the first thing to settle, because it decides whether the rest of this page is a requirement or a reading list.
What this site does with all of it
One pipeline, the same for every publisher: fetch, keep the exact bytes, normalise into requirements or settings, diff field by field against the previous version, and record the publisher's own stated reason where there is one. So the change register can show a control before and after; Controls searches every tracked catalogue at once; and Baselines builds the strictest published set for a platform and lets you trim it. A machine-generated summary is always labelled as one, and never replaces the publisher's words.
Every body, with its source
6 of 35 publishers, at the Baseline step · show all
NIST
The low, moderate and high control baselines, plus the privacy baseline, and the tailoring and overlay rules for adjusting them.
Where categorisation turns into a list. FIPS 199 says 'moderate'; 800-53B says which of the thousand controls that means.
- Derives from
- NIST SP 800-53, FIPS 199 and FIPS 200 (and further up: FISMA 2014)
- Feeds into
- NIST SP 800-171, FedRAMP baselines
- Read it at
- SP 800-53B public
- On this instance
- 5.2.0 · 16 versions held · every version and what changed loaded Fri 23 Oct
Committee on National Security Systems
Security categorisation and control selection for national security systems: the 800-53 catalogue with its own baselines and overlays.
The fork in the road. Two systems can hold the same data and get different control sets, because one is a national security system and the other is not.
- Derives from
- NIST SP 800-53, CNSS policy (and further up: FISMA 2014, FIPS 199 and FIPS 200)
- Feeds into
- DISA Security Requirements Guides, macOS Security Compliance Project
- Read it at
- CNSS instructions public
FedRAMP (GSA)
The low, moderate and high baselines a cloud service must meet to be authorised for federal use, as 800-53 controls plus FedRAMP's own parameters.
The other normalisation path into private business: not a contract clause but a market. A vendor meets FedRAMP once and sells to every agency.
- Derives from
- NIST SP 800-53B, OMB Circular A-130 (and further up: NIST SP 800-53, FIPS 199 and FIPS 200, FISMA 2014)
- Feeds into
- nothing here derives from it yet
- Read it at
- FedRAMP documents public
- The rules, machine-readable public what this instance reads
- On this instance
- 2026.10.13.01 · 5 versions held · every version and what changed loaded 15 Oct
DISA (Defense Information Systems Agency)
Technology-class requirements — an operating system SRG, a web server SRG, a mobile policy SRG — written from the catalogue but not yet about any one product.
The missing middle most people skip. An SRG is where 'AC-11 Device Lock' becomes 'an operating system must lock after 15 minutes', before any vendor is named.
- Derives from
- NIST SP 800-53, CNSSI 1253, DoDI 8500.01 and 8510.01 (and further up: FISMA 2014, FIPS 199 and FIPS 200, CNSS policy)
- Feeds into
- DISA STIGs
- Read it at
- SRGs and STIGs public
NASA OCIO — Cybersecurity Standards and Engineering Team (CSET)
The enumeration of NASA's Agency Security Configuration Standards: the agency's own per-platform hardening specifications, taken from NIST checklists, CIS Benchmarks, DISA STIGs and vendor guidance.
The worked example of an agency layer. NASA does not simply adopt a STIG; CSET reconciles the sources and issues a NASA-approved specification, and that is what a NASA machine is built to.
- Derives from
- NPR 2810.1, NIST SP 800-53, DISA STIGs, CIS Benchmarks (and further up: FISMA 2014, OMB Circular A-130, FIPS 199 and FIPS 200, DISA Security Requirements Guides, CIS Critical Security Controls, CNSSI 1253, DoDI 8500.01 and 8510.01, CNSS policy)
- Feeds into
- nothing here derives from it yet
- Read it at
- CSET (the specifications) agency sign-in NASA sign-in; the specifications themselves are internal
- NTSS (NASA standards) agency sign-in
- Cybersecurity Policy Reference public the public quarterly list of every NASA document, tracked here
- On this instance
- as of 2026-09-15 · 1 version held · every version and what changed loaded 20 Oct
NIST, with DISA, NASA and the Los Alamos National Laboratory
One rule set per macOS release, each rule carrying its references to 800-53, 800-171, the STIG, CIS and CMMC, from which any of those baselines can be generated.
The cleanest answer on this page to 'how are these normalised?'. One rule, many citations, and a build step that emits whichever baseline you asked for.
- Derives from
- NIST SP 800-53, NIST SP 800-171, CIS Benchmarks, DISA STIGs, CNSSI 1253 (and further up: FISMA 2014, FIPS 199 and FIPS 200, NIST SP 800-53B, DFARS 252.204-7012, CIS Critical Security Controls, DISA Security Requirements Guides, CNSS policy, DoDI 8500.01 and 8510.01)
- Feeds into
- nothing here derives from it yet
- Read it at
- macos_security on GitHub public
- On this instance
- iOS 26 Guidance, Revision 3.0 (6262df0) · 3 versions held · every version and what changed loaded 20 Oct
Names that collide
Most of the difficulty in learning this field is that several different things share a name. Each reading below is real; none of them is the wrong answer, so the thing to do is say which one you mean.
- CSET
- NASA OCIO — the Cybersecurity Standards and Engineering Team, which writes NASA's own configuration specifications (the ASCS set). source agency sign-in
- CISA — the Cyber Security Evaluation Tool, free software for assessing yourself against a chosen standard. source public
- Georgetown University — the Center for Security and Emerging Technology, a policy research centre — no controls, no baselines. source public
- FISMA, not FISA
- FISMA — the Federal Information Security Modernization Act: the statute behind every federal control on this site. source public
- FISA — the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act: surveillance authority law. It publishes no controls, baselines or standards, and nothing on this site derives from it. source public
- CSI
- NIST, CSRC and NVD
- 800-53, 800-53A, 800-53B
What this page is not
It is not legal advice, and it is not a compliance determination: whether a given system is obliged to meet a given baseline is a question for the people who authorise it. Every link here goes to a publisher's own address, and the access chip says what that publisher requires of a reader — this site adds no access to anything. Nothing restricted is reproduced here. For the vocabulary, see how to read this site; for what this instance is actually holding, All standards and the change register.