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 Private business alone.

Which body publishes at each step of the chain, by who it writes for
Step	Private businessadopted by contract or by choice, never by FISMA
Law and contractwhat obliges anyone to do this at all	FAR 52.204-21 DFARS 252.204-7012
Policywhat the government or agency directs, under that law	—
Frameworkhow the work is structured: categorise, select, assess, authorise	NIST CSF 2.0 CMMC CIS Critical Security Controls ISO/IEC 27001 and 27002
Control cataloguethe controls themselves, written once for everyone	NIST SP 800-171
Baselinethe controls chosen for one kind of system	FedRAMP baselines macOS Security Compliance Project
Configuration settinghow a control is enforced on a real device	DISA STIGs Microsoft security baselines CIS Benchmarks NSA Cybersecurity Information Sheets
Check and evidencehow conformance is expressed, measured and proved	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 private business

Nothing here is obliged by FISMA. It arrives by contract, by market, or by choice.

Law and contract DFARS 252.204-7012
A defense contract flows SP 800-171 down — or no contract does, and everything below is voluntary.
Policy nobody
There is no rung here. No OMB circular reaches a private company; its own policy is the only policy.
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.
Control catalogue NIST SP 800-171
3.1.10: use session lock with pattern-hiding displays to prevent access after a period of inactivity.
Baseline CIS Benchmarks
The CIS Benchmark for the platform, Level 1 for a workstation, Level 2 where the data warrants it.
Configuration setting Microsoft security baselines
The vendor's own baseline sets the machine inactivity limit, imported as a GPO or an Intune policy.
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

3 of 35 publishers, writing for Private business, at the Check and evidence step · show all

Check and evidencehow conformance is expressed, measured and proved

OSCAL

Check and evidence US federal civilian US defense Private business NASA

NIST

The Open Security Controls Assessment Language: catalogues, profiles, baselines, implementation statements and assessment results as JSON, XML or YAML.

The format that makes any of this computable. A baseline as an OSCAL profile is a document that says 'this catalogue, these controls, these parameters' — which a program can resolve, and a person cannot be trusted to.

Derives from

NIST SP 800-53 (and further up: FISMA 2014, FIPS 199 and FIPS 200)

Feeds into

nothing here derives from it yet

Read it at

OSCAL public
NIST's OSCAL content public

SCAP and the National Checklist Program

Check and evidence US federal civilian US defense Private business NASA

NIST

XCCDF for the checklist, OVAL for the test, CPE for the product, and the NCP repository that holds the published checklists for each platform.

This is what a scanner reads. The same STIG exists as prose for a person and as SCAP content for a tool, and the NCP is the public shelf both come off.

Derives from

NIST SP 800-53 (and further up: FISMA 2014, FIPS 199 and FIPS 200)

Feeds into

nothing here derives from it yet

Read it at

National Checklist Program repository public
SCAP public

CSET (CISA's assessment tool)

Check and evidence US federal civilian Private business

CISA

A free self-assessment tool that walks an organisation through a chosen standard — CSF, 800-53, 800-171, CIS Controls, ICS standards — and reports the gaps.

The one entry here that is software rather than a document, and the easiest way for a small organisation to assess itself against a catalogue it did not write.

Derives from

NIST CSF 2.0, NIST SP 800-53, CIS Critical Security Controls (and further up: FISMA 2014, FIPS 199 and FIPS 200)

Feeds into

nothing here derives from it yet

Read it at

CSET public
cisagov/cset on GitHub public

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.