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 Outside the US alone.

Which body publishes at each step of the chain, by who it writes for
Step	Outside the USthe same job, done by another country's body
Law and contractwhat obliges anyone to do this at all	—
Policywhat the government or agency directs, under that law	—
Frameworkhow the work is structured: categorise, select, assess, authorise	NIST CSF 2.0 CIS Critical Security Controls ISO/IEC 27001 and 27002 Essential Eight and the ISM Cyber Assessment Framework
Control cataloguethe controls themselves, written once for everyone	—
Baselinethe controls chosen for one kind of system	—
Configuration settinghow a control is enforced on a real device	CIS Benchmarks
Check and evidencehow conformance is expressed, measured and proved	—

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.

No trace written for Outside the US yet; all three are above.

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

0 of 35 publishers, writing for Outside the US, at the Law and contract step · show all

Nothing at that combination.

No publisher on this page writes at the Law and contract step for Outside the US. Clear the filters.

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.