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NIST is developing the Open Security Controls Assessment Language (OSCAL), a set of hierarchical, XML-, JSON-, and YAML-based formats that provide a standardized representation of information pertaining to the publication, implementation, and assessment of security controls. OSCAL is being developed through a collaborative approach with the public. Public contributions to this project are welcome. With this effort, we are stressing the agile development of a set of minimal formats that are generic enough to capture the breadth of data in scope (controls specifications), while also capable of ad-hoc tuning and extension to support peculiarities of both (industry or sector) standards and new control types. The OSCAL website provides an overview of the OSCAL project, including an XML and JSON schema reference, examples, and other resources.
Features
- Transitions the legacy approach to security plan generation and management (Word and Excel documents) to a data-centric approach based on common data standards such as XML/JSON
- Puts security compliance data to work by allowing an extensible architecture that expresses security controls in both machine and human readable formats
- Apply the benefits of the data-centric approach to automate existing processes that are resource intensive
- Allows tool developers to implement APIs and provide a standards-based foundation for next generation compliance tools
- Easily access control information from security and privacy control catalogs
- Establish and share machine-readable control baselines
- Maintain and share actionable, up-to-date information about how controls are implemented in your systems
Project Samples
