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. Showing US federal civilian alone.

Which body publishes at each step of the chain, by who it writes for
Step	US federal civilianagencies under FISMA and OMB, and their cloud providers
Law and contractwhat obliges anyone to do this at all	FISMA 2014
Policywhat the government or agency directs, under that law	OMB Circular A-130 CISA directives
Frameworkhow the work is structured: categorise, select, assess, authorise	FIPS 199 and FIPS 200 NIST SP 800-37 (RMF)NIST CSF 2.0
Control cataloguethe controls themselves, written once for everyone	NIST SP 800-53 NIST SP 800-53A
Baselinethe controls chosen for one kind of system	NIST SP 800-53B FedRAMP baselines macOS Security Compliance Project
Configuration settinghow a control is enforced on a real device	DISA STIGs DISA STIG GPO package DISA STIG Intune package Microsoft security baselines CIS Benchmarks NSA Cybersecurity Information Sheets
Check and evidencehow conformance is expressed, measured and proved	Control Correlation Identifiers OSCAL SCAP and the National Checklist Program CSET (CISA's assessment tool)

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.

Law and contract FISMA 2014
The agency must run an information security programme, and NIST's standards are mandatory for this system.
Policy OMB Circular A-130
OMB tells the agency what that programme looks like and binds it to the NIST framework.
Framework FIPS 199 and FIPS 200
The system is categorised moderate for confidentiality, integrity and availability.
Control catalogue NIST SP 800-53
AC-11 Device Lock: prevent further access by initiating a device lock after a period of inactivity.
Baseline NIST SP 800-53B
The moderate baseline includes AC-11, and the agency's parameter sets the period at 15 minutes.
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.
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.

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

3 of 35 publishers, writing for US federal civilian, at the Baseline step · show all

Baselinethe controls chosen for one kind of system

NIST SP 800-53B

Baseline US federal civilian NASA

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

FedRAMP baselines

Baseline US federal civilian Private business

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

macOS Security Compliance Project

Baseline US federal civilian US defense NASA Private business

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

NSA — a Cybersecurity Information Sheet: short hardening guidance on one subject. source public
CIS — the Center for Internet Security — the Controls and the Benchmarks. Easy to type as CSI and mean something else entirely. source public

NIST, CSRC and NVD

NIST — the institute itself, which publishes the standards. source public
CSRC — the Computer Security Resource Center: where the publications live. source public
NVD — the National Vulnerability Database: CVEs and their scores, run by NIST but nothing to do with the standards. source public

800-53, 800-53A, 800-53B

SP 800-53 — the control catalogue: what must be true. source public
SP 800-53A — the assessment procedures: how an assessor would be convinced. source public
SP 800-53B — the baselines: which controls a low, moderate or high system gets. source public

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.