Monday, July 8, 2013

NIST's "Cyber Security Functions" compared to the Ten Dimensions

On July 1, NIST posted a draft outline of the CSF.  It proposed five "cyber security functions" to serve as organizing categories for the framework.  Quoting from the draft:
  • "Know – Gaining the institutional understanding to identify what systems need to be protected, assess priority in light of organizational mission, and manage processes to achieve cost effective risk management goals."
  • "Prevent – Categories of management, technical, and operational activities that enable the organization to decide on the appropriate outcome-based actions to ensure adequate protection against threats to business systems that support critical infrastructure components."
  • "Detect –Activities that identify (through ongoing monitoring or other means of observation) the presence of undesirable cyber risk events, and the processes to assess the potential impact of those events."
  • "Respond – Specific risk management decisions and activities enacted based upon previously implemented planning (from the Prevent function) relative to estimated impact."
  • "Recover - Categories of management, technical, and operational activities that restore services that have previously been impaired through an undesirable cybersecurity risk event."
There are several important differences between these five categories and my proposed Ten Dimensions of Cyber Security Performance.  First, NIST is proposing categories of activities and functions to serve as buckets of content.  There's no formal relationship between the categories, at least not stated explicitly.  Second, the NIST categories only partially and imperfectly cover the space of the Ten Dimensions, as shown in this matrix (click to enlarge):


If you believe in the scope and organization of the Ten Dimensions, then the deficiencies of the NIST functional categories become apparent in the comparison:

  1. "Know" category is scoped too broadly. It is overloaded and contains too many performance dimensions.  I list five question marks (?) in the matrix because I can't tell if these would be included in "Know" or not.
  2. "Respond" and "Recover" categories map to a single performance dimension, implying that they are probably scoped too narrowly.
  3. A glaring omission is lack of coverage for Resilience, which is vital for critical infrastructure.
  4. Also there's no coverage of dimension 5. Effective/Efficient Execution & Operations, and probably no coverage of five other dimensions: 3. Effective Design & Development; 7. Effective External Engagement; 8. Effective Agility & Learning; 9. Optimize Total Cost of Risk; and 10. Responsibility & Accountability.
Thus, the NIST functional categories put too much attention in one or two areas and not enough in many others.  Most serious, there is no coverage in the second loop of the Double Loop Learning model, which implies that the NIST functional categories are inadequate to support agile and continuously innovative cyber security.

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