NIST Draft Guide on Validating the Integrity of Computing Devices

 Submit Comments on Draft NIST SP 1800-34, Validating the Integrity of Computing Devices

The National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence (NCCoE) has published for public comment a draft of NIST SP 1800-34, Validating the Integrity of Computing Devices.

What Is This Guide About?

Technologies today rely on complex, globally distributed and interconnected supply chain ecosystems to provide reusable solutions. Organizations are increasingly at risk of cyber supply chain compromise, whether intentional or unintentional. Managing cyber supply chain risks requires, in part, ensuring the integrity, quality, and resilience of the supply chain and its products and services. This project demonstrates how organizations can verify that the internal components of their computing devices are genuine and have not been altered during the manufacturing or distribution processes.

Share Your Expertise

Please download the document and share your expertise with us to strengthen the draft practice guide. The public comment period for this draft is now open and will close on July 25^th, 2022. You can stay up to date on this project by sending an email to supplychain-nccoe@nist.gov to join our Community of Interest. Also, if you have any project ideas for our team, please let us know by sending an email to the email address above. We look forward to your feedback.

Additional NIST Supply Chain Work

NIST is also working on an important effort, the National Initiative for Improving Cybersecurity in Supply Chains (NIICS) with the private sector and others in government to improve cybersecurity in supply chains. This initiative will help organizations to build, evaluate, and assess the cybersecurity of products and services in their supply chains, an area of increasing concern. For more information on this effort, you can click here.

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Engineering Trustworthy Secure Systems: Final Public Draft is Available for Comment

 NIST is releasing the final public draft of a major revision to Special Publication (SP) 800-160 Volume 1, Engineering Trustworthy Secure Systems. This final public draft offers significant content and design changes that include a renewed emphasis on the importance of systems engineering and viewing systems security engineering as a critical subdiscipline necessary to achieving trustworthy secure systems. This perspective treats security as an emergent property of a system. It requires a disciplined, rigorous engineering process to deliver the security capabilities necessary to protect stakeholders’ assets from loss while achieving mission and business success.

Bringing security out of its traditional stovepipe and viewing it as an emergent system property helps to ensure that only authorized system behaviors and outcomes occur, much like the engineering processes that address safety, reliability, availability, and maintainability in building spacecraft, airplanes, and bridges. Treating security as a subdiscipline of systems engineering also facilitates making comprehensive trade space decisions as stakeholders continually address cost, schedule, and performance issues, as well as the uncertainties associated with system development efforts.

In particular, this final public draft:

• Provides a renewed focus on the design principles and concepts for engineering trustworthy secure systems, distributing the content across several redesigned initial chapters
• Relocates the detailed system life cycle processes and security considerations to separate appendices for ease of use
• Streamlines the design principles for trustworthy secure systems by eliminating two previous design principle categories
• Includes a new introduction to the system life cycle processes and describes key relationships among those processes
• Clarifies key systems engineering and systems security engineering terminology
• Simplifies the structure of the system life cycle processes, activities, tasks, and references
• Provides additional references to international standards and technical guidance to better support the security aspects of the systems engineering process

NIST is interested in your feedback on the specific changes made to the publication during this update, including the organization and structure of the publication, the presentation of the material, its ease of use, and the applicability of the technical content to current or planned systems engineering initiatives.

 

The public comment period is open through July 8, 2022. See the publication details for instructions on submitting comments, including a template for preparing comments.

NOTE: A call for patent claims is included on page v of this draft.  For additional information, see the Information Technology Laboratory (ITL) Patent Policy--Inclusion of Patents in ITL Publications.

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 Today, NIST is seeking public comments on NIST IR 8409 ipd (initial public draft), Measuring the Common Vulnerability Scoring System Base Score Equation.

Calculating the severity of information technology vulnerabilities is important for prioritizing vulnerability remediation and helping to understand the risk of a vulnerability. The Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) is a widely used approach to evaluating properties that lead to a successful attack and the effects of a successful exploitation. CVSS is managed under the auspices of the Forum of Incident Response and Security Teams (FIRST) and is maintained by the CVSS Special Interest Group (SIG). Unfortunately, ground truth upon which to base the CVSS measurements has not been available. Thus, CVSS SIG incident response experts maintain the equations by leveraging CVSS SIG human expert opinion.

This work evaluates the accuracy of the CVSS “base score” equations and shows that they represent the CVSS maintainers' expert opinion to the extent described by these measurements. NIST requests feedback on the approach, the significance of the results, and any CVSS measurements that should have been conducted but were not included within the initial scope of this work. Finally, NIST requests comments on sources of data that could provide ground truth for these types of measurements.

The public comment review period for this draft is open through July 29, 2022. See the publication details for instructions on how to submit comments.

 

NOTE: A call for patent claims is included on page iv of this draft. For additional information, see Information Technology Laboratory (ITL) Patent Policy – Inclusion of Patents in ITL Publications.

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Open for Public Comment: Preliminary Draft Practice Guide (Vol. A) From the ZTA Team

The Zero Trust Architecture (ZTA) team at NIST’s National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence (NCCoE) has published Volume A of a preliminary draft practice guide titled “Implementing a Zero Trust Architecture” and is seeking the public’s comments on its contents. This guide summarizes how the NCCoE and its collaborators are using commercially available technology to build interoperable, open standards-based ZTA example implementations that align to the concepts and principles in NIST Special Publication (SP) 800-207, Zero Trust Architecture. As the project progresses, the preliminary draft will be updated, and additional volumes will also be released for comment. As an enterprise’s data and resources have become distributed across the on-premises environment and multiple clouds, protecting them has become increasingly challenging. Many users need access from anywhere, at any time, from any device. The NCCoE is addressing these challenges by collaborating with industry participants to demonstrate several approaches to a zero trust architecture applied to a conventional, general purpose enterprise IT infrastructure on premises and in the cloud. We Want to Hear from You! The NCCoE is making Volume A available as a preliminary draft for public comment while work continues on the project. Review the preliminary draft and submit comments online on or before (July 5th, 2022). 

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