NIST 800 53: A Complete Guide for Compliance

What is NIST 800-53?

NIST SP 800-53 is a comprehensive set of guidelines that helps organizations establish effective operating procedures and implement robust security controls. NIST SP 800-53 was developed as a response to the E-Government Act of 2002, which led to the creation of the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA). Although originally intended for federal information systems, it is now beneficial for all organizations in building their security infrastructure. It offers a catalog of controls to ensure the integrity, confidentiality, and security of information systems while also ensuring regulatory compliance.

In September 2020, version 5 of the framework was released, which introduced several notable changes. Firstly, there was a modification in terminology, removing the terms “federal” and “information,” thereby rendering the framework applicable to all types of organizations. Secondly, the revised framework places greater emphasis on privacy, possibly influenced by the growing number of privacy protection laws. Version 5 of NIST SP 800-53 integrates privacy considerations into security controls, and introduced a higher degree of operational flexibility. There is now less prescriptive oversight related to specific tools, technologies and techniques. For example, Version 5 does not impose specific criteria for password length or complexity; rather, it mandates the use of complex and, more importantly, effective passwords.

Who needs to comply with the NIST- SP 800-53?

NIST SP 800-53 is a compliance standard that federal information systems, agencies, contractors and departments working with the US government must adhere to. In addition, under the DFARS 252.204-7012 regulation (2017), contractors associated with the Department of Defense (DOD) must ensure that their operations and supply chains meet the security requirements outlined in NIST SP 800-171. In other words, all DOD contractors must implement specific security controls from NIST SP 800-171 – a subset of controls from NIST SP 800-53.

What are the features and benefits of NIST 800-53?

The main features and benefits of NIST 800-53 are as follows:

Comprehensive control catalog: NIST 800-53 provides a catalog of security and privacy controls that organizations can implement to protect their information systems and data. These controls are categorized into 18 different families, covering various aspects of security such as access control, risk assessment, incident response, and system maintenance.

Risk-based approach: NIST 800-53 emphasizes a risk-based approach to security, where organizations assess their systems and data to identify and prioritize the potential risks. It provides guidelines on selecting and implementing controls based on the identified risks, helping organizations allocate resources effectively to mitigate the highest priority risks.

Flexible implementation: The framework is designed to be flexible, allowing organizations to tailor the controls to their specific needs. It does not prescribe specific technologies or solutions but provides a set of security objectives that organizations should achieve. This flexibility allows organizations to adapt the controls to their unique environments, systems, and goals.

Mapping to other frameworks: NIST 800-53 includes mappings to other widely adopted security frameworks such as ISO 27001, COBIT, and PCI DSS. This allows organizations already using these frameworks to easily integrate the NIST controls into their existing security programs.

Continuous monitoring: NIST 800-53 promotes a continuous monitoring approach to security, where organizations continuously assess, track, and report the effectiveness of their implemented controls. It provides guidance on selecting appropriate monitoring tools and techniques and defines the frequency and scope of monitoring activities to ensure ongoing security.

Integration with Risk Management Framework: NIST 800-53 is closely aligned with the NIST Risk Management Framework (RMF), which provides a structured process for managing security risks. The controls outlined in NIST 800-53 complement and support the risk management activities defined in the RMF, enabling organizations to implement a holistic and integrated security program.

Adoption in government and beyond: NIST 800-53 was initially developed for the U.S. federal government, and it has become the de facto standard for information security in government agencies. However, it is also widely adopted by organizations in various industries, including healthcare, financial services, and critical infrastructure sectors due to its comprehensive and flexible approach to security.

NIST 800-53 Framework Security and Access Control Families

The NIST 800-53 control families provide organizations with a comprehensive framework to address various security threats that their information systems may face. They cover various areas of security, such as access control, contingency planning, incident response, system and communications protection, auditing, and many others.

The NIST 800-53 Control Families include:

AC – Access Control: The AC control family encompasses security requirements that focus on system logging, including access to assets, reporting capabilities, account management, system privileges, and remote access logging. These requirements are designed to determine users’ system access levels and keep track of when they access the system.

AU – Audit and Accountability: The AU control family encompasses security measures pertaining to an organization’s ability to conduct audits. This includes the establishment of audit policies and procedures, the logging of audit activities, the generation of audit reports, and the safeguarding of audit information.

AT – Awareness and Training: The control sets within the AT control family cater to the unique security training and procedures of your organization, which also includes maintaining security training records.

CM – Configuration Management: CM controls pertain exclusively to the configuration management policies of an organization. These controls encompass establishing a foundational configuration that serves as the starting point for future alterations or developments in information systems. This involves creating inventories of information system components and implementing a control for conducting a security impact analysis.

CP – Contingency Planning: The family of CP controls comprises specific measures that an organization adopts to address potential cybersecurity incidents in their contingency plan. These measures encompass activities such as testing the contingency plan, keeping it up-to-date, providing training, creating backups, and restoring systems.

IA – Identification and Authentication: IA controls are dedicated to the establishment and enforcement of identification and authentication policies within an organization. These policies encompass the verification and validation of both internal and external users, as well as the overall administration of such systems.

IR – Incident Response: The controls for incident response (IR) are tailored according to an organization’s own incident response policies and procedures. These encompass various aspects such as training, testing, monitoring, reporting, and the response plan.

MA – Maintenance: The maintenance requirements for organizational systems and the associated tools are specified in the MA controls.

MP – Media Protection: The Media Protection control group consists of controls that are exclusive to access, marking, storage, transport policies, sanitization, and prescribed usage of media within organizations.

PS – Personnel Security: PS controls refer to the measures implemented by an organization to ensure the safety and security of its personnel. These controls encompass various aspects such as evaluating the level of risk associated with specific positions, conducting thorough screening of personnel, implementing termination policies, facilitating transfers, imposing sanctions when necessary, and establishing access agreements.

PE – Physical and Environmental Protection: The purpose of implementing the Physical and Environmental Protection control family is to safeguard systems, buildings, and supporting infrastructure from physical risks. These measures comprise of physical access approvals, surveillance, visitor logs, emergency shut-off protocols, power and lighting systems, fire safety provisions, and mitigation against water damage.

PL – Planning: The control PL family focuses on an organization’s security planning policies. It requires the organization to address several factors, including the purpose, scope, roles, responsibilities, management commitment, coordination among entities, and organizational compliance.

PM – Program Management: The PM control family pertains to the individuals responsible for overseeing your cybersecurity program and its functioning. This encompasses various elements such as a critical infrastructure plan, information security program plan, plan of action milestones and processes, risk management strategy, and enterprise architecture, among others.

RA – Risk Assessment: The family of RA control deals with an organization’s policies for assessing risks and its capabilities for conducting vulnerability scans. By using a comprehensive risk management solution, you can simplify and automate your compliance efforts.

CA – Security Assessment and Authorization: The controls in the Security Assessment and Authorization control family enhance the implementation of security assessments, authorizations, continuous monitoring, plan of actions and milestones, and system interconnections.

SC – System and Communications Protection: The SC control family encompasses perimeter protection, securing information while at rest, ensuring the safety of collaborative computing devices, employing cryptographic protection measures, defending against denial of service attacks, and more.

SI – System and Information Integrity: The SI control family focuses on safeguarding system and information integrity. A part of this control family is NIST SI 7, which covers various measures such as fixing vulnerabilities, defending against malicious code, monitoring information systems, issuing security alerts, and ensuring the integrity of software and firmware. Additionally, it also includes protection against spam.

SA – System and Services Acquisition: The SA control family includes controls for information system documentation, development configuration management, and security testing and evaluation by developers.

Best Practices for NIST SP 800-53 Compliance

To achieve compliance with NIST 800-53, it is essential to understand and incorporate the following fundamental security principles.

Discover and classify sensitive data: Locate and classify all sensitive data according to your business policy. This should provide you with knowledge of your sensitive data, system vulnerabilities, and potential threats.

Map data and permissions: Gain an understanding of who has access to which data. Identify all user, group, folder, and file permissions within your system.

Manage access control: Create rules to govern information access and strictly enforce them. Improve access control by deactivating unused accounts, proactively managing user and group memberships, and implementing a “least privilege” model.

Monitor user behavior: Keep detailed records of how users access systems and data. Use these records to establish a baseline of regular activity and use that baseline to detect anomalies. Install a solution that can monitor and detect insider threats, malware, and misconfigurations.

Foster a security-centric culture: Educate employees on NIST SP 800-53 regulations and create a culture where security is everyone’s responsibility. Ensure that staff members are accountable for their role in maintaining information systems security.

Perform ongoing assessments: Use security assessment tools recommended by NIST SP 800-53 to assess security posture in real-time. These tools gauge the effectiveness of security measures and suggest improvements based on empirical evidence.

Once controls are implemented and best practices are followed, NIST SP 800-53A provides standard assessment procedures to evaluate the effectiveness of security controls in meeting an organization’s security requirements. These procedures can be supplemented or customized based on an organizational risk assessment.

How Lepide Helps with NIST SP 500-53

The Lepide Data Security Platform provides data protection for both on-premise and cloud environments through behavioral analysis, detection of suspicious activity, and the ability to revert and restore unwanted changes. Lepide can help organizations adhere to the NIST 800-53 standards in the following ways:

Identify privileged users: Lepide helps to ensure that the risk of data loss is minimized by identifying the most privileged users within an organization and regulating their access to sensitive data.

Data discovery and classification: Lepide helps identify the location of the most sensitive data and who has access to it. This knowledge enables the implementation of strict access controls based on the principle of least privilege.

Improved operations security: Lepide assists with operations security by monitoring and alerting on any changes made to configurations in important data stores or Group Policy Objects. This aids in verifying the authorization of such changes.

Security incident management: Lepide promptly alerts users when a security incident occurs and provides a comprehensive audit trail for investigating its root cause. Real-time alerts can be directed to specific team members, fostering shared responsibility.

If you’d like to see how the Lepide Data Security Platform can help you comply with NIST SP 800-53A, schedule a demo with one of our engineers.